Jocks&Nerds Issue 6, Spring 2013

STYLE HISTORY CULTURE VOLUME 1 ISSUE 6

“The whole Wild Bunch thing was never a plan.” www.jocksandnerds.com

l evi svi nta g e c l oth in g.c o m

©

A FREE QUARTERLY

SPRING 2013

The N1 Project features a fishmonger, a puppeteer, a blogger, a barber, a boxer, a market stall owner – proud Islingtonians from local establishments.

Contemporary British Menswear.

STYLE HISTORY CULTURE ©

VOLUME 1 ISSUE 6 Cover star: Milo Johnson photographed by Janette Beckman. Jacket by Baracuta

Editor-in-Chief & Creative Director Marcus Agerman Ross marcus@jocksandnerds.com Art Director Phil Buckingham phil@jocksandnerds.com Associate Editor Chris Sullivan chris@jocksandnerds.com Sub Editor Julia Newcomb Director of Photography Ross Trevail ross@jocksandnerds.com Designer Colin Christie Interns Lynette Szeto, Chris Tang Financial Director Marcus Bayley accounts@jocksandnerds.com Publisher Lisa Woodman lisa@jocksandnerds.com Subscriptions subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com Stockists stockists@jocksandnerds.com &Communications White label creative solutions from Jocks&Nerds andcommsagency.com Contributors Salim Ahmed Kashmirwala, Mark Anthony, Olie Arnold, Jules Balme, Janette Beckman, Roger Charity, Pelle Crepin, Emma Freemantle, Jill Furminovsky, David Goldman, Lee Vincent Grubb, Tim Hans, Ben Harries, Paul Hartnett, Paolo Hewitt, Adam Howe, Barry Kamen, Betina La Plante, Agnes Lloyd-Platt, Chris May, Laura Mazza, Cameron McNee, Luke Moran-Morris, Ben Part, Mattias Pettersson, Richard Simpson, Juan Trujillo Andrades, Paul Vickery, Gavin Watson, Kirk Watson, Mark Webster Special thanks to Billy and Sarah at Oi!Oi! The Shop, Mark Baxter at Mono Media PR, John Boreland at Soulful Management System, Lucinda Brown and Justine Fancy at Mama Group, Valeria Caffagni at WP Lavori in Corso, Stuart Deabill, Ernie at Finisterre, Jody Furlong at The Eye Casting, Gulf Stream Surf boards, Joanne Harris and everyone at Thames Rowing Club, Brent Howarth, Jeff at the 100 Club, The Hollybush pub, north London, Stuart Kirkham, Betina La Plante, Mike Pickering, Oshun Santiaga at Hot 110 Entertainment, Michelle Noel at Ally Capellino, Jon & Tea Pollock, Sally Reeves PR, Ilka Schlockerman at Ilka Media, Kevin Stone Correction: Issue 5 Apologies to Langley Gifford from The Detonators for spelling his name wrong in SEEN

Jocks&Nerds Magazine, 80 Scotney House, Mead Place, London E9 6SW Telephone +44 (0) 7747 758877 www.jocksandnerds.com www.facebook.com/jocksandnerds Twitter: @jocksandnerds AIM: JocksAndNerds Jocks&Nerds is free magazine published 4 times a year. Printed by Park Communications Ltd parkcom.co.uk If you would like a copy delivered to your door contact us at subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com Postage prices UK £5, Europe £10, North America £12, RoW £14 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher.

The opinions expressed in the magazine are that of the respective contributor and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff.

Jocks&Nerds is published four times a year by Jocks And Nerds Ltd. ©2013 Jocks And Nerds Ltd.

p108

Contents 10-19 SEEN: Skins are back in all their

smart, sharp glory

20-34 NEWS: What’s exciting over the

coming months

36-43 PEOPLE: Look good. Be good 44-49 DETAIL: Trail Running Photographs David Goldman Styling Olie Arnold

p50

108-111 COVER STORY: Milo Johnson

helped pioneer the music revolution of the early 1990s

112-119 STYLE: The Negrit Brothers Photographs Roger Charity Styling Barry Kamen 120-127 STYLE: Night and the City Photographs Cameron McNee Styling Richard Simpson

50-59 CINEMA: Northern Soul is a film

by photographer Elaine Constantine 64-71 STYLE: Dogtown Photographs Ben Harries Styling Steph Wilson

128-131 HISTORY: Andrew Loog Oldham

is still rolling

132-139 STYLE: Passed the Eyot Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Emma Freemantle

72-73 BULLETIN: Dawson Denim make

denim like it used to be

74-77 MUSIC: Ginger Baker is still touring

with Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion

78-81 MUSIC: Shuggie Otis is back with

a new album

p10

140-141 BULLETIN: Hancock Vulcanised

Articles keep you dry

142-147 GALLERY: London Jazz Festival

captures the magic of improvised live jazz 148-151 MUSIC: Aaron Neville is doing

doo-wop

82-89 STYLE: Kappa Delta Phi Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Mark Anthony

152-159 STYLE: Cold Water Surfing Photographs David Goldman Styling Olie Arnold

90-99 CULTURE: Jamel Shabazz is

one of the most important documentary photographers of the past 50 years 100-107 CINEMA: Film Noir is reaching

legions of new fans through digital technology

160-161 BULLETIN: Schott celebrates

100 years

162-165 PROFILE: The Dodge Brothers

recorded their latest album at Sun Studios 166-173 HISTORY: Weegee documented

the darker side of the human condition

174-185 FOLIO: B-Boy Championships. The

Family Business. Seun Kuti and Egypt 80.

NY Creatives.

186-188 SPOTLIGHT: Hammond B3 is the

organ of choice for a variety of musicians

190-191 ICON: Bass Weejuns are loved by film stars and gadabouts alike p120

p90

Chris Hancock, Electrician

Norman Jay MBE, DJ

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SEEN

Hannah-Rae Phillips, 17, from Kent Describe your style.

Smart. The skinhead look is always smart whether wearing jeans or a suit.

What’s so special about Skins?

It’s something that stays with you for life.

Describe Skins in three words.

It’s a family.

Who’s your favourite band?

George Dekker and The Pioneers.

Skins Photographs Paul Hartnett

The skinhead movement first came to prominence in the UK as a tougher, more streamlined version of the mod style in the late 1960s. A decade later, a more politicised version of the movement came to the fore, personified by bands such as the 4-Skins. Influenced by Sham 69, not only were they from the working class backgrounds they championed in their songs, they were compelled to mobilise a generation against the political and social issues of the day.

The present revival, which has been slavishly documented by photographer Paul Hartnett, comes during a new era of economic difficulties but, it seems, other influences are responsible this time.

Today’s youth has little to no room to manoeuvre in terms of developing their own voice before it is jumped upon, repackaged, used up and discarded in the blink of an eye. For many, looking to something from the past that already has a set of values, undiluted style parameters and a sense of camaraderie becomes very appealing. paulhartnett.com Oi! Oi! The Gig hosts The Skinhead Invasion of London on 2 March at The Dome, Boston Arms, Tufnell Park N19.

A special one-off event in aid of Muscular Dystrophy Campaign charity will take place on 1 March at the Fiddler’s Elbow, 1 Malden Road NW5. Tickets are available from wegottickets.com or Oi! Oi! The Shop, Unit 654, The Stables Market, London NW1

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Ralph Orton, aka Ralph the Barber, 21, barber, from Sheffield wears jacket by Levi’s; shirt by Fred Perry What’s so special about Skins?

Class pride in who you are.

Describe Skins in three words.

Take no shit.

Who’s your favourite band?

I like various types of music: ska, reggae and soul bands but also Oi! and punk.

SEEN | Skins

Jedd Baker, aka Jedd, Son Of Oi!, 16, schoolboy and lead guitarist in Close Shave, from Staffordshire wears shirt by Ben Sherman What’s so special about Skins?

The people. The camaraderie is like nothing else.

Describe Skins in three words.

Do or die.

Who’s your style icon?

My parents, both lifelong skinheads.

Who’s your favourite band?

The 4-Skins and Skinfull.

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Fin McDermott, 19, menswear sales assistant, from Leeds wears vintage coat; sweater by Slazenger; shirt by Mikkel Rude Describe your style.

Early skinhead through to 70s suedehead/soulboy.

What’s so special about Skins?

It’s about distancing oneself from the mainstream while finding something to fit into.

Describe Skins in three words.

Hard. Smart. Proud.

Who’s your style icon?

Cary Grant. Steve McQueen. Fred Astaire.

All men who understood the art of looking immaculate.

What’s your favourite movie?

Angel-A.

Junior Boss of The JJs, 26, DJ and electrician, from Kent wears suit by Adam of London; shirt

by Pretty Green; shoes

by Bass Describe your style.

A fresh take on the traditional skinhead style.

What’s so special about Skins?

For me, it’s not so much about what’s special about skins, it’s more what’s special about the music.

Jamaican reggae, rockstready and the 2 Tone sound.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Prince Buster.

Miranda Le Croissette, accountant Describe your style.

Rockin’.

What’s so special about The Detonators?

A great bunch of like-minded people.

Describe the Detonators in three words.

Cool. Organised. Busy.

Who’s your style icon?

The glamorous female stars of the 1950s.

Who’s your favourite band?

BossHoss.

SEEN | Skins

Phuoc Ngo, 33, DJ and photographer, from Zürich wears jacket

by Alpha Industries; cap from Camden Market What’s so special about Skins?

The style and the music are timeless. This ‘scene’ is probably the only culture with a broad musical spectrum, from reggae and soul to punk, so skinheads find a style that fits.

Describe Skins in three words.

Steady. Hard. Smart.

Who’s your style icon?

I’m influenced by different cultural takes on casual style.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Roy Ellis What’s your favourite movie?

The Matrix.

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SEEN | Skins

Brian Kelson, 54, DJ and record dealer, from Shropshire What’s so special about Skins?

The ethos is pro society. Work hard, pay your own way. Give respect to the deserving.

Expect the same in return.

Describe Skins in three words.

Clean tough look.

Who’s your favourite musicians?

Drumbago. Glen Adams. Larry Marshall.

The Uniques.

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SEEN | Skins

19

NEWS

Levi’s Vintage Clothing

When hot rodding first appeared in California in the 1930s, more often than not those pioneering enthusiasts indulged in their passion in garments that could withstand the rigours of racing a homemade speed machine and, that meant wearing jeans and sportswear by Levi’s. Brian Bent, owner of U50 (the name is inspired by the 50 states of America) is a Californian, is keeping the spirit and style of the original hot rodders alive. levisvintageclothing.com u50.com Photographs Tim Hans Styling Laura Mazza Hot Rodders Brian Bent, Esther Bent, Dana Harvey and JJ Wessels

Brian wears shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing.

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JJ wears shirt

by Levi’s Vintage Clothing.

Esther wears dress by Levi’s Vintage Clothing. Brian wears shirt and jeans by Levi’s Vintage Clothing.

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adidas cycling range

adidas is renowned for its support of fringe Olympic sports and the like.

And as an expert of technical sports fabrics, it is only right that adidas steps into the cycling apparel business. But simply making a one size fits all range of gear isn’t the brand’s style style. Oh no. Instead, adidas has created three different lines that cater for the needs of various types of cyclists, from the hardcore athletic to the casual, genteel commuter. adidas.co.uk Photograph Juan Trujillo Andrades Rider Laurent Gisellu Bicycle Genesis Vapour genesis.co.uk

Pumukli bags

Still an undergraduate at the London College of Fashion, Tatiana Goldmannova has been producing, singlehandedly, an array of accessories all made from high grade, vintage denim.

Alongside wallets and card holders, Goldmannova designs and produces a range of bags under the name Pumukli. Currently, Pumukli is only available by private commission but already the order books are swelling so look out for a ready-to-wear range in the near future. pumukli.co.uk

Dreamachine

Since 1962, when the artist and visionary Brion Gysin completed the Dreamachine while living at Paris’s Latin Quarter “Beat Hotel”, the machine has been more legend than reality. A stroboscopic flicker device that you use with closed eyes produces visual hallucinations, and was designed by Gysin to offer a drugless high. Bespoke Dreamachines are now commercially available for the first time, with part of the profits going to Gysin’s friends and fellow space-travellers, the Master Musicians of Joujouka. dreamachine.ca joujouka.org Words Chris May Photograph Jill Furminovsky

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Photograph Luke Moran-Morris Traveller Hedge Pearce

Is Saitch Yer Daddy?

Kosmo Vinyl lives in New York City, which is “3,473 miles from Upton Park” from where his beloved West Ham United’s Boleyn Ground is located. However, as they say, you can take the boy out of the East End... Vinyl was part of the fabric of the British music scene in the late 1970s and 1980s, most famously as an integral part of The Clash entourage. He can be heard introducing the band on stage on their Live At Shea Stadium album, and he also worked with The Jam, produced Jack Black and was musical consultant on Gus Van Sant’s film Drugstore Cowboy.

Throughout, however, he has remained a West Ham fan, something that has become a long distance love affair for him and his two sons. During the club’s relegation 2011-2012 season, this fanaticism manifested itself in a rolling blog coupled with Vinyl’s own collages. This has now been brought together as an exhibition called Is Saitch Yer Daddy? (an infamous piece of graffiti on the District Line Tube line heading out to Upton Park), which can be seen at the Eb & Flow Gallery, Leonard Street, London in April. ebandflowgallery.com Words Mark Webster

Paul Hartnett Vintage Archive at PYMCA

Paul Hartnett maintains the night he photographed punk cohort Soo Catwoman was his light bulb moment. Since 1976, Hartnett has built up one of the most important collections of social documentary photographs, charting 35 years of youth, street and club culture in the UK. And it is this approach to photography that has led him to source one of the most interesting collections of archive images from the 18th and early 19th century. Noting the similarities between the style and poses and the technical approach to these early photographs to his own work, Hartnett became obsessed with building an invaluable catalogue of early photographs.

Recently, his collection has been bought

by PYMCA, an image library specialising in youth culture and style. pymca.com paulhartnett.com

Charles Olive

Recently quitting his job in marketing, Olive now dedicates all his time to designing, manufacturing and selling his own brand ties.

Starting on a simple sewing machine, he soon got the hang of producing his own bow ties, which are made using fabrics designed by himself. Curiously, these designs are influenced by his time working in management. His previous job meant he spent a lot of time using Excel but not more design orientated software.

Unperturbed, Olive found a way to use the cleric application to create unique and witty repeat patterns for his ties. charlesolive.com Photograph Kirk Watson Dandy Mattias Bjorklund

Sebago beef roll loafers

Hailing from Maine, USA, Sebago can perhaps lay claim to being the footwear brand most aligned to the Ivy League look. This season it has gone back to its preppy roots to create the Made In the USA collection based on the classic penny loafer. Using Horween leather, this loafer comes in two styles – a beef roll or a tassel version. sebago.com

Moscot glasses

Despite gaining a global following, Moscot glasses maintains the air of a local business. Hyman Moscot, an immigrant from eastern Europe, arrived in New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Without a storefront, Hyman began his business selling readymade glasses from a pushcart. Now the business is run by Hyam’s great grandchildren, Harvey and Kenny. After almost 80 years based at 118 Orchard Street in New York, Moscot is moving to new premises this spring. Regular customers and fans shouldn’t have too much difficulty finding the new store – it is just 10 doors away at number 108.

Moscot are inviting customers to share their memories of the old store. For more information, visit the website. moscot.com

Photograph Luke Moran-Morris Preppy Scott Ogden

Photograph Janette Beckman

Justin Deakin socks

Cordwainer Justin Deakin is recognised for creating modern shoes for gentlemen who adhere to the traditions of shoemaking. With more than 20 years experience, Deakin works with only the finest craftsmen and materials to create his classic, yet distinctive, shoes. Catering for a clientele with a keen eye for detail, it comes as no surprise that Deakin has finally created his own brand socks. Like his shoes, his socks use only the finest fabrics. justindeakin.com Photograph Mattias Pettersson

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NEWS

Carhartt x Diemme

Diemme Footwear, a small family owned shoe company from Italy, has collaborated with Carhartt this season to create a small collection of casual footwear utilising some of the key elements of the Carhartt brand DNA; comfort, practicality and a nod to contemporary street style. carhartt-wip.com diemmefootwear.com Photograph Luke Moran-Morris Filmmaker Oscar Hudson

Ray-Ban Aviator Folding Ultra

As part of its 75th anniversary, Ray-Ban has created a limited edition series of folding Aviators. The first Aviators were made in 1937 to protect the US air force from the sun’s glare while flying. In fact, they were originally called “Anti-Glare” before adopting the more familiar Ray-Ban moniker. No matter the name, Aviators, with their distinctive teardrop lenses, remain perhaps the most revered of all sunglasses. ray-ban.com Photograph Luke Moran-Morris

Jonny Owen. Vicky McClure. Johnny Harris

Gathered together in Soho’s Bar Italia, Jonny Owen, Vicky McClure and Johnny Harris represent perfectly the diversity of this island’s acting talent. Hailing from Merthyr, Nottingham and south London respectively, each is seeing their career moving in a nicely upward direction. Owen is a genuine multi-talent, having been at any given time a musician, DJ, TV presenter, writer, producer and actor. Much of this came together in a series of short comic films about the music business called Svengali. Owen has now developed it into a feature film, set to open this spring, for his own Roots Films, with executive production from the celebrated Baby Cow, featuring a cast that includes Martin Freeman, Michael Smiley, Matt Berry and Maxine Peake. Co-starring alongside Owen in Svengali is Vicky McClure, the young actress who has established a high pedigree already in her career, having started out with writer/director Shane Meadows in his film A Room For Romeo Brass. She has since become best known as Lol in Meadow’s This Is England (2006). Johnny Harris played Mick in the same film, which earned him a Bafta nomination. He established his credentials as a performer in gritty films such as Gangster No1 and, most significantly, London to Brighton. However, he has also worked in bigger budget productions such as Dorian Gray and Snow White & The Huntsmen. Harris’s new film is an edgy London thriller, Welcome To The Punch, written and directed by Eran Creevy who debuted in 2008’s Shifty. svengalimovie.com welcome-to-the-punch-movie-trailer.blogspot.co.uk Words Mark Webster Photographs Gavin Watson Location Bar Italia, London baritaliasoho.co.uk

FA 150th Anniversary

Melvyn Bragg considers it one of the 12 books that have changed the world. Written in 1863, the Rules Of Association Football was created by a group of men who had gathered that same year at the Freemasons Arms pub in Covent Garden to create the FA. Now, 150 years on, and there are not many global brands that can outdo the popularity and sheer money-generating power of football. Not that everyone cares about its success as a commercial enterprise. Only that it is the greatest game on earth.

The anniversary will be commemorated extensively at The National Football Museum, which was rehoused last year at the new Urbis Building in Manchester, having moved from Deepdale, home of Preston North End. Preston were one of the founding teams of the Football League, which itself is 125 years old this year. As part of the Museum’s celebrations, Mark Baxter and Paolo Hewitt’s 2004 book The Fashion Of Football has been used to inspire the exhibition Strike A Pose. Charting the past 50 years since football lifted its maximum wage limit, the exhibition includes outfits worn by the game’s first ‘rock star’ George Best, photos by Terry O’Neill and a look at the fashion culture of fans across the decades. nationalfootballmuseum.com Words Mark Webster

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Stone Island Marina

Following on from its 30th anniversary last year, Stone Island have revived its Marina diffusion line which, as the name suggests, is inspired by seagoing apparel.

The new Marina collection consists of 12 pieces inspired

by Stone Island’s archives. stoneisland.co.uk Photograph Luke Moran-Morris Sailor Lloyd Peacock

Good Vibrations film

Few, if any, can lay claim to having such a huge influence on the Northern Irish music scene than Terri Hooley, who owned the Good Vibrations record store and label in Belfast. The label looked after bands such as The Undertones, Rudi and The Outcasts.

The film Good Vibrations tells the story of Terri Hooley and the scene during the late 1970s. Appropriately, it has a soundtrack created by David Holmes who was a regular customer at the store.

In cinemas from 29 March

Gabicci 40th anniversary

Gabicci first opened its doors in Maddox Street in London, 40 years ago this year. Named after the seaside town of Gabicce Mare, founders Jack Sofier and Alex Pyser started the Gabicci brand to capture their love of the classic 1960s Italian style that was so recognised through Italian cinema and with movie stars, such as Marcello Mastroianni. Over the past 40 years, the Gabicci brand, renowned for its waffle knits and suede has been adopted by a variety of subcultures including mods and rude boys. To celebrate this landmark, it has created a new collection inspired by its own archives. gabicci.com Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Boxer Dudley O’Shaughnessy

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Sideburn Clothing

Sideburn, the independent Bristol-based motorcycle magazine, has produced an exclusive range of T-shirts and sweatshirts with graphics by a range of artists including, Chris Watson, Stevie Gee, Adi Gilbert and Maxwell Paternoster. sideburn.bigcartel.com Photograph Ben Part

Manhattan Portage x Defected Records In 1983, Manhattan Portage first sent New York’s bike messengers out with its ubiquitous bags slung across one shoulder. However, it wasn’t too long before another army of workers – DJs – wanted to take advantage of a product the company calls New York Tough. Its combination of innovative use of materials and design, not to mention the perfectly understated skyline logo patch, has seen Manhattan Portage’s burgeoning variety of bags remain a style staple. This year, it has teamed up with British house label Defected Records to produce a range of bags that perfectly fit the modern spinner’s needs. manhattanportage.co.uk defected.com Words Mark Webster Photograph Luke Moran-Morris DJ Cai Trefor

Philip Treacy by Kevin Davies

Philip Treacy is one of the best known milliners in the world.

Yet, he guards his privacy well.

Especially when it comes to being photographed at work. In fact, only one photographer over his 20-year career has been given access. This new book brings together a series of images and words by photographer, Kevin Davies. The book presents still-life studies of Treacy’s work, which highlight the intricate detail, and skill adopted by the Irishman in his craft. But much of the book is dedicated Davies’ documentary photographs which contain a candour that is uplifting and interesting, particularly the images of worldfamous models who are more often represented in very clinical, processed photographs. phaidon.com Photograph Kevin Davies.

YMC x Festival shoes

Spanish playboys and wannabe Mr Ripleys are, no doubt, already familiar with Festival’s range of waffled Summer shoes. But for most, it is a brand completely unknown. YMC, the independent British label has teamed up with the brand to create a small range of shoes to keep their customers well-heeled over the summer. youmustcreate.com Photograph Juan Trujillo Andrades Artist Felipe Ortega-Regalado

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Naomi Campbell, Royal Ascot, 6 June 2002.

Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images/nbpictures

Sebastião Salgado Genesis exhibition

As a photographer, Sebastião Salgado has dedicated his career to some of the most thought-provoking and epic projects ever seen. Following on from Workers and Migration, his latest global project is called Genesis. 8 years in the making, Genesis draws together images of landscapes and wildlife, alongside depictions of human communities that continue to live in accordance with their ancestral traditions and cultures. Salgado says of the project, “This has been one of my longest photographic adventures: eight years researching, exploring and celebrating nature’s unspoiled legacy. I have journeyed through 32 countries to rediscover the mountains, deserts and oceans, the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society. It is a pictorial depiction of the lands and lives of a still pristine planet. I feel Genesis also speaks urgently to our own age by portraying the breathtaking beauty of a lost world that somehow survives.” The exhibition opens in April at the Natural History Museum. amazonasimages.com nhm.ac.uk

H A C K E T T. C O M

E S S E N T I A L LY B R I T I S H

Y-3 10th anniversary

Ten years ago, adidas teamed up with Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto to create the first Y-3 collection. It was only natural, then, that a label was created that acknowledged the appropriation of sportswear into everyday clothing. One of the key elements of sportswear is use performance fabrics, functional rather than stylish per se, yet it is these fabrics that have often attracted people to wear sports garments in a new way. Therefore, to create a range that adopted the key ingredients of sportswear required the skills and knowledge of a designer who has a fundamental understanding of the drape and movement of fabric. To acknowledge this first decade, Y-3 has looked at elements such as prints and fabrics from the past for this new season. y-3.com Photograph Luke Moran-Morris Baseball team Harry Bloom, Paul Layzell and Siraaj Mitha

Brooks Brothers for The Great Gatsby

Fela Kuti

The complete works of Afrobeat originator Fela Kuti are to be reissued by newly-formed Knitting Factory RecordsUK during 2013. The programme was conceived and directed

by Fela’s revered, long time manager, Rikki Stein. The first discs will roll out on 4 March: The Best Of Black President 2, a 2CD collection introduced by R&B/ hip hop artist Akon which comes with a DVD of Fela’s 1984 Glastonbury concert; the first 10 discs in a 26CD, chronological re-issue programme of almost 50 Fela albums; and the 26CD box set The Complete Works Of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Each release in the programme includes in-depth track commentaries by Jocks&Nerds writer Chris May. knittingfactoryrecords.com Words Chris May Illustration Lemi Ghariokwu

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The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 literary classic, is once again in the cinema (the fourth version). This time directed by Baz Luhrmann. In the 1920s, America was in the golden age of jazz and it signalled a shift in attitudes amongst the young who were becoming more liberal and flamboyant. As such, it was a great period of style.

Unsurprisingly, Brooks Brothers, America’s oldest apparel retailer, begun in 1818, were asked to create more than 500 costumes for the film, many influenced by their own archives. brooksbrothers.com thegreatgatsbymovie.com

Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures

Chuck Berry

Born in 1926, it seems almost impossible that Chuck Berry is still performing today. Unlike certain other artists of the past 100 years, his influence on popular music is often overlooked. His first chart success was in 1955, a full year before Elvis came along. Even more remarkable is the rumour that Chuck Berry has an album’s worth of new material. With all the current focus on rockabilly style it would be most fitting to hear a new album from the “Father of Rock n Roll”. chuckberry.com

WHen spring is in THe Air, even our bArrels cAn feel iT. Jack Daniel always knew that the Hollow was blessed with the perfect climate for making whiskey. As temperatures change with each passing season, the whiskey that matures inside our barrels is forced in and out of their charred oak walls. This process is what gives Mr. Jack’s whiskey much of its rich f lavor. And it’s why we imagine that our barrels look forward to spring’s arrival almost as much as we do.

J A C K D A N I E L’ S

TENNESSEE WHISKEY

It ain’t called sippin’ whiskey for nothing. Please drink responsibly. ©2013 Jack Daniel’s. All rights reserved. JACK DANIEL’S and OLD NO. 7 are registered trademarks.

Abe Odedina

An architect by trade, Nigerian born Abe Odedina began painting in his spare time after a trip to Brazil a few years ago. Drawn to the visual vibrancy of the South American and Caribbean artwork, Odedina began developing his distinctive, decorative style in his south London studio. In particular, Odedina’s work is influenced by Haitian voodoo art. Coupled with an arresting use of colour, his paintings are often devoid of perspective, which Odedina hopes “encourages a mythical interpretation of the world.”

Odedina’s passion has, in turn, led to the founding of his own store, Good Companion, based in Herne Hill. The store offers a variety of artwork and furniture alongside Odedina’s own work. abeodedina.com thegoodcompanion.co.uk Photograph Ben Harries Words Marcus Agerman Ross

PEOPLE Matthew Halsall

Unlikely as it might be, a group of musicians in Manchester are rekindling the sun-kissed astral jazz forged in the US in the late 1960s by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane, and they’re doing it with luminous conviction.

The scene is centred on trumpeter Matthew Halsall’s Gondwana Records label and Manchester’s Northern Quarter clubs Matt & Phreds and Band On The Wall.

Gondwana launched in 2008 with Halsall’s Sending My Love, and has since released seven more albums, including three by saxophonist Nat Birchall, who with harpist Rachael Gladwin, is a core member of Halsall’s band.

Halsall’s fourth disc, Fletcher Moss Park, was released in autumn 2012.

Everybody who is into astral jazz has a special Pharoah Sanders track, usually the first Sanders track they heard.

For Halsall, it is ‘You’ve Got To Have Freedom’, a staple of Sanders’s live performances since 1980, when he debuted it on Journey To The One (Theresa Records).

“I was at a Mr Scruff club night,” says Halsall. “I thought straightaway, ‘This is the sound for me.’ I started buying literally anything that Pharoah was on.” This led Halsall to Coltrane, who with Sanders had recorded the astral jazz classic albums Ptah, The El Daoud and Journey In Satchidananda (both Impulse!, 1970).

Alongside the astral band, Halsall has recently begun touring a technology-enriched trio. “It evolved from supporting Portico Quartet on tour,” says Halsall. “There wasn’t much stage space for the support band. So it’s just trumpet, drums and keyboards, with the keyboard player doing the bass with his left hand on a vintage Moog synthesizer. It sounds like electric-era Miles Davis but with even more bass, pedals and effects.”

Meanwhile, Halsall’s fifth astral album, untitled at the time of writing, with an expanded lineup including flute, koto and string section, is due for release this spring. matthewhalsall.com Photograph Ross Travail Words Chris May

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Omar and Max Beesley

Reunited on stage towards the end of last year at The Jazz Cafe, London, Omar and Max Beesley go back a long way as fellow students and musical collaborators. They first met at the celebrated Chetham’s School Of Music in Beesley’s native Manchester, then later at the famous Guildhall Of Music & Drama in London, and these two precocious talents quickly established themselves as among the finest of their generation.

Beesley became a much sought after multi-percussionist and recording artist. All of this while establishing an acting career on both sides of the Atlantic. Omar has been part of the British funk and soul scene since his teenage years, and his solo recordings for labels such as Kongo, Talkin’ Loud and RCA has seen him work with a stunning array of artists such as Stevie Wonder, Lamont Dozier and Angie Stone.

His body of work helped earn him an MBE last year.

Early examples of the pair working together can be tracked down via the acclaimed Boogie Back Records, but for 2013, Omar is back in singular form, with a brand new album featuring his usual kaleidoscopic array of funk, soul, latin, house and afro beat. omarmusic.co.uk maxton-beesley.com Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross Words Mark Webster

PEOPLE

Bebe Black

Singer-songwriter Bebe Black’s elfin attitude perfectly encapsulates the current penchant for the skinhead/suedehead look. Smart, sassy and with a cheeky grin, Black’s vivacious character is witty and life-affirming. Yet in her songwriting, Black uses the rawest of phrases, expressing the cons as well as the pros of the 24-hour party lifestyle of today’s youth. Just like her influences, Courtney Love and Siouxsie Sioux, she displays fiery independence without sacrificing emotion.

With original ambitions to pursue a career in the fashion industry, it’s not surprising Black has a clear sense of her own style. But it’s not her appearance that caused a gaggle of record company execs to cluck over her last year.

Having posted a few songs on Myspace, her music (a blend of blues-tinged dubstep and 1980s influenced percussion) excited fans and industry bods alike. Her debut album is out later this year. bebeblack.com Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Words Marcus Agerman Ross

Burton Bradstock

Singer Burton Bradstock is the alter ego of Cornish born, American Songbook vocalist Jimmy Cannon and he is on a mission to bring the English folk into the modern jazz vernacular. Bradstock’s debut album All Upon A Lovely Summer’s Day, on experimentalist F-IRE label, presents 19th century folk songs in 21st century jazz settings.

Against expectations, it works: the music made by Bradstock’s sextet, augmented by guest saxophonist Iain Ballamy and a string quartet, is brave, quirky and delightful.

“I wanted to find my English roots,” says Bradstock. “The band is about heritage. As a stage name, I think Burton Bradstock has the right feel. It’s a village in south Dorset.”

Until recently, when Norwegian musicians led by saxophonist Jan Garbarek started exploring their folk heritage, most players took their material from blues, gospel and the American Songbook. The traditional music of Britain and mainland Europe was only occasionally referenced – saxophonist John Coltrane’s use of ‘Greensleeves’ on his 1961 album Africa/Brass being one instance.

Bradstock’s benchmark for the project was English bandleader Mike Westbrook’s 1980 album, The Westbrook Blake: Bright As Fire, which set the poetry of visionary artist William Blake to jazz arrangements. Another inspiration is William Morris, the socialist designer.“I’d like everyone to read Morris’s News From Nowhere,” says Bradstock, “and then we’d all live happily ever after.” burtonbradstockmusic.com Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Words Chris May

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Pokey LaFarge

Hailing from the midwest city of St Louis, Pokey LaFarge has become one of the most important proponents of American music in the past few years. Describing himself as a “musician, songwriter, bandleader, entertainer, innovator and preservationist”, LaFarge creates music that takes in everything from jazz, ragtime and country blues.

His shows are truly theatrical experiences as he bops, shouts, thrills and delivers a musical spectacular with his band, The South City Three. His relentless touring has garnered him legions of fans and his recorded work hasn’t gone without recognition either. In fact, he won the award for Best Americana album for two years running at the prestigious Independent Music Awards. This kind of talent is hard to keep under wraps. So it comes as no surprise to hear him popping up on Jack White’s last album, Blunderbuss.

Keen to be recognised as a contemporary artist, Pokey explains his music thus: “It’s not retro music. It’s American music that never died.” pokeylafarge.net Photograph Ross Trevail Words Marcus Agerman Ross

Kevin Cunningham

Kevin Cunningham has had a successful career illustrating a variety of books for publishers including Penguin, Faber & Faber and Pan. And as a fan of classic cars, he has also created a wealth of automotive illustrations. He has recently melded both interests by invested in a Citroën H van that will act as a mobile gallery/studio called Van GO! to showcase Cunningham’s second career as a portrait painter.

Fifteen years ago Cunningham entered his picture of spywriter Phillip Knightley into the BP Portraits awards at the National Portrait Gallery in London and it won second prize. Since then he has painted a wealth of well known characters including art critic Brian Sewell and playwright Tom Stoppard. Kevin cites Lucien Freud as one of his influences and, last year, he was invited to lecture and carry out painting classes in the style of Freud for the National Portrait Gallery. This summer, Cunningham will put on a solo exhibition on the Greek island of Sifnos. commissionaportrait.com Photograph Ross Trevail Words Marcus Agerman Ross

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PEOPLE

Robert Urbanus

Forty years ago, if you were a London based African music enthusiast, there was only one place in town where you could indulge your habit: the small back room of Sterns Electrical shop on Tottenham Court Road. There, standing among the steam irons and curling tongs, were a couple of racks of African vinyl. Old Mr Stern, as history names him, got his stock from African students at the nearby London University, one of whom, in the late 1960s, had pitched up with a box of discs and suggested the venture. Sterns became an institution.

Sterns Music’s latter day owner, Robert Urbanus, has put the operation on a more organised footing. Urbanus is one of a trio of enthusiasts who bought the name and reopened a bigger store round the corner from the original shop that closed in 1983. Now primarily a recording label and digital distribution company, during the past three decades Sterns has released 200 physical albums and a similar number of digital-only downloads, and plays a vital, and often unsung, facilitating role in much of the African music activity in Britain.

“My accountant says I’m the fool who can’t give it up,” says Urbanus, explaining Sterns’ survival through the major label incursions into “world music” of the late 1980s and the modern downturn in CD sales. A work ethic helps too. Urbanus was brought up in Rotterdam, and the Dutch say that if you buy a shirt made in that city, it comes with the sleeves already rolled up. sternsmusic.com Photograph Juan Trujillo Andrades Words Chris May

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Baloji

Congolese rapper Baloji’s Kinshasa Succursale album incorporates the mellow and melodic Congolese rumba created by bandleaders Franco and Rochereau in the late 1950s into his music. Born 34 years ago in Zaire, as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was then known, Baloji grew up in Belgium. Was he aware of Congolese rumba as teenager? “I hated it,” says Baloji. “I was a very unpleasant teenager and it was the music my parents listened to.” Instead, for 11 years, Baloji was a member of the successful Belgian hip hop crew Starflam. But, eventually, rumba got to him. Along with DRC’s electrified-thumb piano band Konono No1, Kinshasa Succursale includes gorgeous contributions from veteran rumba band Zaiko Langa Langa.

As a Belgian and citizen of the DRC, Baloji holds two passports. “But I don’t feel particularly Belgian in Belgium, nor Congolese in Congo,” he says. “After being illegal for two years, I got Belgian nationality in 1999, but everything there reminds me that I’m Congolese. I’m still a black man in Europe. Even in a country like UK, where you see [black] newscasters on television – which is different from the rest of Europe – there is a divide.”

Baloji encounters a different sort of tension in DRC. “In Congo, I have a European education and perspective. Because I am from the diaspora, and have European ideas in me, that makes me seem different. In my music, I try to suggest answers to this. My little daughter is mixed race, and that makes me try harder.” baloji.com Photograph Mattias Pettersson Words Chris May

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PEOPLE Pete Frame

Pete Frame hit his 70th year late last year, and this is now half a lifetime away from when his dedication to music and amazing, meticulous manner of documenting its history, began to make an impact on both the music and the medium.

In 1969, he started ZigZag magazine, a name lifted from a Frank Zappa track, to cover the underground music scene he felt wasn’t being serve by the established music press.

However, it is his attention to detail and flair with a pen that has established his legacy. He started his books tracing the history of music The Rock Family Tree while he was working at ZigZag with more cursory examples of the roots of The Byrds and John Mayall, but as the years passed by, it became not only more intricately detailed, but also a work of art in its own right. It has gone on to cover entire music genres and band histories and was the basis for a BBC television series.

Designer Jules Vegas recalls being a young fanzine editor when Frame was working at Stiff Records. “He was very generous when it came to giving away records,” but Vegas didn’t know who Frame was at the time. However, when Vegas eventually joined Stiff himself, “I should have realised because Frame was the only person in the press department who knew what a Rotring pen was. A copy of his New York Dolls family tree sat proudly on the wall above my desk.” familyofrock.com Photograph Ross Trevail Words Mark Webster

DETAIL

Trail Running Photographs David Goldman Styling Olie Arnold Styling Assistant Otter Jezamin Hatchett Runner Jace Moody at Next

Windbreaker by Napapijri; leggings by Puma; T-shirt by Nike; trainers by adidas; snood by Buff.

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Windbreaker by Nike Gyakusou; leggings

by Asics; T-shirt by Porsche Design Sport; trainers by adidas; sweatband by Nike.

DETAIL | Trail Running

Windbreaker by Stone Island; leggings by Nike; vest by Puma; compass by Eurohike.

Windbreaker by Henri Lloyd; jacket by Stone Island; vest by Reebok; gloves by Nike; rucksack by CamelBak.

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DETAIL | Trail Running

Windbreaker by adidas; top

by Porsche Design Sport.

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CINEMA

Northern Soul The Spinning Wheel. Roger Eagle. Wigan Casino. Drops. Spins

Interview Chris Sullivan Photographs Paul Vickery Styling Adam Howe Photographic Assistant Tori Khambhaita Styling Assistants Emily Bowen and Kirsty Wilson IT Technical Support Stephanie Andrew Starring Liam Becket, Rennie Dakin, Ethan Howarth, Sam McKeown, Dave Stabler, James Whitehead, Josh Whitehouse and Jordan Wilson

Photographer and filmmaker Elaine Constantine is well known for her depiction of British youth. Her images have appeared in magazines such as The Face, Vogue and Sleaze Nation. Her new project is a film and labour of love. Northern Soul follows two boys whose lives are changed when they discover soul music and strive to become the best club DJs. The film documents a scene that emerged from clubs in the late 1960s in northern England. DJ Roger Eagle is credited with introducing much of the music at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. A decade later, Wigan Casino was the place to dance.

The music was mainly American black soul and included songs such as ‘Hey Girl, Don’t Bother Me’ by The Tams – reaching No1 in September 1971 and Wigan’s Chosen Few’s ‘Footsee’ released in January 1975.

The moves are particular – a mix of rhythmic shuffling and acrobatics.

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Why Northern Soul?

It was my first passion in terms of music.

I’d got into photography and was working for The Face and i-D magazine and shot a lot of stills of Northern Soul but I was too late. I was older and the youth element of Northern Soul – the excitement I’d seen as a teenager – just wasn’t there as I remembered it. So I thought I’d make a documentary with interviews of people who were my age and older but I wasn’t really getting that feeling of excitement with their dancing – there was only one person slightly younger than the rest doing acrobatics and that was good, but it wasn’t the same as in its heyday. It wasn’t working for me. I thought this is not it. Even though people are very passionate about collecting the vinyl, the soul acts, the music, the lyrics and the venues, it just doesn’t have that same feel – and it never will. So I thought, “God, I’ve got to recreate this. Get young people together and get them to understand

what it’s about.” It’s such a removed culture now and so different to when I was growing up. It wasn’t just about showing them how to do some dance moves – it was everything. So it took a long time to come to fruition.

How long?

More than 15 years but I wouldn’t say that was full time because I’ve had a photography career and I had started to direct films as well. But I don’t think it could have taken any less time. It took lots of preparation and time to get to the point where I felt it was right. If someone had come along with the money and said to me, “Shoot now or in a year,” I’d have said, “Let’s do it in a year,” as you can keep preparing forever.

But then you got the green light…

Yes, and then it moved so fast that there were scenes coming at me that I hadn’t even thought through. I was turning up with all these extras, thinking, “How >

Josh wears coat, wardrobe from film;Â sweater by Paul Smith; vintage shirt by Jaytex.

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am I going to direct this?” But they’re coming at me – bam, bam, bam – six or seven scenes a day. I was there with my headphones on, and I could hear everyone going, “Action, action!

Speak, speak!” And I was thinking, “Shit what am I gonna do?!” It’s such a frightening experience.

And what had you done before?

I’d done some pop videos and a lot of adverts. The first music video was for Richard Hawley for ‘Baby You’re My Light’. He didn’t want to be in it; all he wanted in the video was his guitar and it was very low budget. So I shot old folk doing ballroom dancing at tea dances and it won the Best Newcomer Award 2002 from Creative Review. All my subject matter is similar; I go for realism. That’s my thing.

What was your biggest influence cinematically?

As a kid, I was obsessed with the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s, like Saturday Night Sunday Morning, Loneliness of A Long-Distance Runner and Kes. I was from a working class background and I hadn’t seen films like that before, that represented me. I first saw Spring And Port Wine in 1970 and I remember thinking, “It’s just like my family”. That idea of realism was the first thing I fell in love with, you didn’t hear this clipped public school accent, instead it was someone going, “You can piss off!” And I thought, “Oh yeah, this is real” I loved the humour. I didn’t get the sentiment of it back then. They had a theme but a lot were about characters that had an ideal within the constraint of working class life, and that ideal would be crushed by the end of the movie. The pressure of life had ruined that ideal and they’d have to conform within the constraints.

So when I started writing my film I tried not to do that. I didn’t want that to be the outcome, because it’s not always that way.

Look at my story: I have no education and I’ve managed to do something with my life and force through that idea and get out of those constraints. My closest friends are all from that same background but we’ve all done what we’ve wanted to do and 52

that’s what I wanted the film’s theme to be. Especially my mates who are DJs and travel the world, and have their independence and work in an industry they love and have chosen. I didn’t want to write a story that depresses me. The cinema is escapism: I don’t think it always has to be fantasy but the viewer needs to get caught up with the characters and their life and be interested in them.

I like to be entertained and I’ve made this film to entertain people and express some wonderful aspects of this subculture that is often misrepresented.

really well. City of God (2002) and We Own The Night (2007) also worked.

How did you train the dancers?

I’ve got some bloody great friends and we created this thing called The Dance Club five years ago and just started ringing up kids on the scene and getting them together. We had a chap called Frannie from Glasgow, Paul from the Midlands, Gill who is a Londoner, Brent from Bolton among others. We began with an initial trawl for a year, which brought kids down to London, and then we did a dance group once a month and we’d invite different people.

Then we’d say, “These are the records you dance to. Have a listen and just try and pick it up.” We didn’t want the dancing in the film to be choreographed and have them all looking like clones.

Keb Darge, a Northern Soul DJ, got involved and got a few kids down.

Why do you think Northern Soul happened when it did?

It was a spin-off of mod culture.

Mods were into soul, dressing smart, and dancing all night high on speed – some hardcore mods carried on and Northern Soul was born.

Were the lead actors picked for their dancing or acting talent?

Acting.

And then you taught them to dance?

Yeah.

How did they feel?

The lead lad struggled. But thankfully he looked shit hot. And then there were loads of kids who were just dancers and wanted a part. And then there were kids we’d just met and talked to.

If we thought someone was good but not a big actor, we asked him or her to come along to see how they danced.

That’s quite a big undertaking – there are very few nightclub scenes that work on film…

Yes. I thought Quadrophenia worked

In terms of lighting, look and feel, was it difficult to recreate a dance hall?

I had a good designer. We couldn’t use Wigan because it’s gone so we used King George’s Hall in Blackburn. DJ and Northern Soul fanatic Richard Searling took me there. It’s three times bigger than the hall at Wigan and I thought I’d never fill it but he was confident, so we put an online advertising campaign together and we filled it to the rafters.

Why do you think so many youth cultures like Northern Soul emanate from the British working classes?

I’m from a working class background and I always had the feeling that unless you dressed well you would be judged as a scumbag. We were hard up but immaculately turned out. The mod and skin/suedehead cultures were all about this. This ethos comes from working in manual jobs where you could be filthy all day – in a boiler suit or overalls – but when it was your own time you felt strongly about your appearance and got excited about smart clothes.

Being smartly dressed appealed more to working class kids than say hippy culture, where folk didn’t quite look as well turned out and I think the whole identity thing goes back to this manual versus clerical thing.

The other main influential group as far as youth culture is concerned is Black Americans who have come up with so many style nuances – zoot suits, jump ’n’ jive, Little Richard, 1960s soul, 1970s funk, disco, hip hop etc. Why do you think this is and do Brits and poor black yanks have anything in common?

Maybe they had some things in common like being broke and being in shit jobs but I think it stops there. >

CINEMA | Northern Soul

James wears tank top

by Peter Werth; trousers and shoes, model’s own; shirt by Farah.

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Are some Northern Soul fans today trying to relive their youth or is it all about the music?

People feel a sense of belonging and come back to it because they feel safe knowing what they know and being with people who have a shared history.

I find it odd that some fans listen to nothing else. What do you think?

I listen to a lot of other music and I like a lot of stuff but I always like dancing to Northern Soul and I like hanging around with friends who are into it as they are the best folk I know. I’m certain that most people would listen to other music but there’s just so much of that music to get through. It’s the collecting thing that makes people like that.

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Why is it so important that everyone dances in exactly the same way?

I like going to all-nighters where the floor is filled with people who can dance in the Northern Soul way, as it’s easier to get lost in the music. A lot of people trying a Northern Soul night for the first time will dance with a drink in their hand, spilling it on the floor making a large area impossible to dance in; sometimes they try to strike up a conversation with you mid dance.

Some folk will take the piss out of your dancing. All this kind of stuff stops me getting lost in the music and that’s why the dance floor etiquette has evolved the way it has. A whole dance floor of people becomes one as the floor fills.

You only have to go on to a balcony to witness this from above – it’s like watching the ebb and flow of the tide.

It’s wonderful if you are part of that.

Is it a little elitist?

No, I think anyone is welcome as long as they respect the etiquette on the floor. It’s not an easy dance although it looks like it might be. The older you get the harder it is to learn so it may feel elitist if you can’t join the floor.

Do you think that the style of dress grew out of the dance style?

It gets very sweaty dancing all night.

The more popular Northern Soul became, the more packed out and hot the clubs became, so the clothes became less restricting. At youth clubs in the 1970s I did see the style that everyone associates with Northern soul but when I started going to all-nighters in the 1980s and even through to the 1990s no one person wore wide, baggy trousers, vests or full circle skirts. That era had gone. It’s only in the past 10 >

CINEMA | Northern Soul

Ethan wears jacket, wardrobe from film; trousers by Roxy Threads; T-shirt by Fred Perry.

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Rennie wears jacket by Baracuta; trousers by Peter Werth; T-shirt by Original Penguin; boots

by Clarks.

years that I’ve seen it again and it seems to be either kids just getting into it or middle-aged people who are into that vintage style.

Is it important to go forward by looking back?

I get bored of looking back; I like to hear new discoveries. I don’t go to all-nighters much these days, maybe around 10-15 times a year instead of every weekend.

Mostly I like to hear DJs who have deviated slightly and are trying out different things than the same old.

How significant is it that such cultures are preserved?

I don’t think anything should stay the same. We should always try hard to make things better and refreshed.

I’ve seen quite a few young people getting into Northern Soul of late.

Is this a rejection of our modern, disposable society?

I have no idea how they have got into it but I guess that they seem 56

Liam wears tank top and trousers, model’s own; shirt by Brutus Trimfit; shoes by Solatio.

to feel a huge sense of belonging, like we did. And they like the idea of original vinyl as opposed to digital stuff. When I was young I chose Northern Soul music and culture and I rejected popular music because I thought a lot of it was rubbish and because I didn’t like what went with it – getting hammered in local pubs and clubs that were like meat markets with people so shitfaced that they couldn’t stand up let alone dance.

Maybe I was a snob but I felt part of something special being into the Northern Soul scene.

What are your favourite Northern Soul Records?

Lester Tipton’s ‘This Won’t Change’; ‘You Don’t Mean It’ by Towanda Barnes; Oscar Wright’s ‘Fell In Love’.

What Northern Soul DJs do you rate?

At the moment there’s only one – Butch aka Mark Dobson.

I turned up at a Northern Soul event a few years ago and played CDs as they were easier to carry on the train. Some were aghast but the music was still the same. Why is this?

CDs are a no-no. People go to the ends of the earth to uncover this vinyl. Part of the thrill is that it’s all played from the original source. That’s why bootlegs are also unacceptable.

No one can ever doubt that Northern Soul was one of the best and, in some ways, most idiosyncratic youth cultures. Can you describe what it was like walking into Wigan Casino for the first time aged 16?

Maybe that’s something that the film will show. It was certainly my ambition to depict that feeling. It’s important to say that Northern Soul is not just about Wigan Casino, it’s more about being into soul at a certain time in your life.

Northern Soul is out in the autumn northernsoulthefilm.com

CINEMA | Northern Soul

Jordan wears sweater by Fred Perry; trousers by Roxy Threads; vintage shirt by John Wood.

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Josh wears shirt by Brutus Trimfit; trousers and belt, wardrobe from film; shoes by Solatio.

CINEMA | Northern Soul

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Baracuta

Words Paolo Hewitt Photographs Paul Vickery Styling Adam Howe Photographic Assistant Tori Khambhaita IT Technical Support Stephanie Andrew Band The Spitfires thespitfires.org Jackets Baracuta

In 1967, Eric Clapton appeared on stage in London, with his band The Yardbirds, wearing a G9 Baracuta jacket. Stylish as ever, Clapton had the jacket’s famous collar buttoned up.

I would posit that the guitarist bought the jacket at the Ivy Shop in Richmond, Surrey. Run by John Simons, it had been set up to supply executives with Ivy League clothing to match their American counterparts. The plan did not work out too well: on opening day hundreds of working class teenagers showed up to peruse and purchase the shop’s expensive items. They remained Simons’ core customer base while the execs remained staunchly absent.

The Baracuta G9 jacket quickly became one of the shop’s bestsellers.

More commonly known as the Harrington, it was Simons who first coined the name, labelling the jacket after the character, Rodney Harrington, in the hit American TV show, Peyton Place that ran from 1964 to 1969.

Played by Ryan O’Neal, Harrington regularly wore the jacket in the show, and as a result many assumed the jacket was American, and wearing one was a fast track to teenage cool. How wrong were they? Back then, few knew that Baracuta was a British brand, established in 1937 in Manchester by brothers John and Isaac Miller.

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It is said that it rains every other day in the northern city. And that is no mistake. Manchester grew out of the textile trade of the industrial revolution.

West of the Peak District, the constant moisture in the air was a key influence on textile manufacturing. The Baracuta brand was launched to help keep people dry when caught in one of Britain’s downpours. Acting as a substitute for an unwieldy umbrella, the vent on the back of the jacket cleverly mirrors the curve of an open umbrella and keeps rain away from the wearer.

“Baracuta rainwear really does something for a man,” the company’s first ads proclaimed. Spot on. Through function, Baracuta was pioneering a form of dressing. Until then, casual and sports clothing was the preserve of the wealthy and the aristocracy.

For others, clothing was functional, and this meant workwear and Sunday best. Here was a jacket that transcended class. Golfers who, at that time, were upper class gents, and smart young men were enthralled by the function of this new jacket.

The Miller Brothers had brilliantly anticipated a major change. The design of the G9 was nothing short of radical and ground-breaking. Despite the influence on menswear, the initial design was actually unisex and based

around a blouson jacket; a short jacket with the shape of a blouse.

Harrington may have entered into fashion parlance but only a Baracuta can be a true Harrington. For aficionados, there are three key details to a Baracuta Harrington. The collar is a stand-up, always with two buttons, as worn by Clapton. It is the easiest way to recognise that James Dean is not wearing a Harrington in his 1955 movie Rebel Without A Cause. His jacket has a falling collar. Some believe it to be a McGregor jacket, although many think it was made specially for the film by the wardrobe department. The distinctive vent yoke means it can always be spotted from behind. Finally, there is the tartan lining. In 1938, the company received permission from the Fraser clan to use their tartan. Predominantly red, the lining is unmissable when the jacket is worn open – a detail used to great affect by minute shifts in the location of the zipper.

The initial success of their jackets allowed the Miller brothers to quickly expand into the US market. From their offices in the Empire State Building in New York, they set their sights on a large, style-hungry audience. After the second world war, America had a thriving economy that allowed young men to indulge in dressing well, and >

ADVERTORIAL

for themselves; something that hadn’t really existed before.

Several years before Rodney Harrington sported the G9 in Peyton Place a certain young music god, by the name of Elvis Presley, shook his hips and whipped up a storm in his best film, King Creole in 1958. His character, Danny Fisher wears a Baracuta G9.

But, if rumours are to be believed, it wasn’t planned that way. Shooting in New Orleans, the production was governed by the weather which, during filming, tended towards the wetter side of the tropical locale. During one downpour, a runner was spotted wearing a waterproof jacket and was immediately asked to surrender it to the film’s star to keep him dry. As soon 62

as he donned it, Elvis felt it suited the style of his character.

Since then, the provenance of the Baracuta brand has continued to grow thanks to the approval of musicians and film stars through the ages. Think Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra, The Clash, The Specials, Liam Gallagher, Paul Weller, DJ Norman Jay and footballer Thierry Henry, to name but a few. Alongside the famous and the beautiful, the Baracuta jacket has been adopted and revered by virtually every subculture movement since the 1950s from mods, skins, suedeheads, soul boys, all the way to the Britpop scene of the 1990s.

Recently, the Baracuta brand has been acquired by WP Lavori, an Italian

company with 30 years’ experience protecting and nurturing heritage brands. Working with Kenichi Kusano, previously creative director of Beams Plus in Japan, WP Lavori will continue to lovingly craft the Baracuta jackets in the UK, building on the brand’s classic staples, taking the designs to a global audience. As Kusano states, “I am interested in British brands with a rich history, and the Baracuta G9 is a true icon.

The G9 will continue to be made in England and will be the blueprint for the new collections. After all, why mess with perfection?” Why, indeed. baracuta.com wplavori.com

ADVERTORIAL

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STYLE

Shirt by Element; jeans by Horiyoshi The Third; vest by All Saints; shoes by Vans.

Dogtown

Photographs Ben Harries Styling Steph Wilson Grooming Tony Vin Styling Assistant Hayley Nunn Production Chris Gibson Skater Jimmy Q

Vest by All Saints; braces

by The Stronghold, LA.

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STYLE | Dogtown

Jacket by Beautiful Fül; jeans by Horiyoshi The Third; waistcoat by Filson, from The Stronghold, LA; shirt by Natural Selection; boots by Dr Martens; sunglasses by Ray-Ban; rings by Stephen Einhorn.

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Waistcoat by Filson from The Stronghold, LA; jeans by Horiyoshi The Third; shirt by Natural Selection; hat by The Stronghold, LA; sunglasses by Ray-Ban; rings by Stephen Einhorn.

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STYLE | Dogtown

Shirt by Lou Dalton; trousers by Natural Selection; braces by The Stronghold, LA; sunglasses by Triwa; rings by Stephen Einhorn.

Shirt by Element; jeans by Horiyoshi The Third; vest by All Saints; shoes by Vans.

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STYLE | Dogtown Shirt by Common People; trousers

by Stone Island; vest by All Saints; rings by Stephen Einhorn.

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BULLETIN

Laurie Hilton-Ash, 51, artist, wears apron

by Dawson Denim Describe your style.

My own take on Rockabilly style.

Describe Dawson Denim in three words.

What he said.

Who’s your style icon?

Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Who are your favourite musicians?

Hank Williams. Mystery Gang.

What’s your favourite movie?

Two-Lane Blacktop.

Dawson Denim Photographs Luke Moran-Morris Words Marcus Agerman Ross

Based in Brighton, East Sussex, Dawson Denim was founded a year ago by Kelly Dawson and Scott Ogden. Inspired by the historical uses of denim, they set up a studio incorporating original sewing machines. Ogden’s background as a photographer and vintage furniture dealer has proved invaluable, but it is Dawson’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the fabric that is central to the ethos of the brand.

Dawson explains, “Our aim is to create heavy duty and durable workwear, to encourage the idea of being made to last 72

and kept for a long time. To achieve this, nothing can be compromised. All bartacks and stitching are functional, not decorative, and the quality is paramount: we use Japanese red line selvage from a 100-yearold mill. The quality is a compact weave and 13oz, which will last.”

Dawson Denim has created four aprons based on designs from the 1940s and 1950s, signalling a recognition of the utilitarian background of the fabric.

Today, though, they are an individual looking product and demand is high.

As if to highlight the hardwearing nature of their products, Dawson and Ogden drew inspiration from vintage motors for the brand, and each item comes with a logbook based on a 1930s car manual.

The range also includes a couple of bags based on historical designs.

Refined, durable and beautiful, it’s hardly surprising that legions are waiting to see what Dawson Denim will deliver next. dawsondenim.com

Simon Bridger, 44, co-owner of Bobby and Dandy Vintage, Hove, wears apron by Dawson Denim; jeans by Studio D’Artisan; sweatshirt by YMC; boots by Red Wing Shoes Simon Webster, 43, co-owner of Simon Webster Hair, Brighton, wears apron by Dawson Denim; dungarees

by Dickies; boots by Red Wing Shoes Describe your style.

A mix of French and American vintage workwear.

What’s so special about Dawson Denim?

The passion, care and understanding.

Describe Dawson Denim in three words.

Classic. Wearable. Functional.

Who’s your style icon?

Gene Kelly.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Johnny Cash.

What’s your favourite movie?

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Describe your style.

Functional.

What’s so special about Dawson Denim?

They produce the highest quality garments because they aren’t capable of doing anything less.

Describe Dawson Denim in three words.

Attention to detail.

Who’s your style icon?

John F Kennedy.

Who’s your favourite musician?

David Bowie.

What’s your favourite movie?

The Wicker Man.

Donna Grimaldi, 35, co-owner of Bobby and Dandy Vintage, Hove, wears apron by Dawson Denim; vintage skirt by Kathwyn; vintage shoes by Bandolino Describe your style.

Mid 20th century with an 1980s twist.

What’s so special about Dawson Denim?

Their historical knowledge of denim.

Describe Dawson Denim in three words.

Cool. Classic. Considered.

Who’s your style icon?

I have many. Diana Dors.

Anna Karina.

Béatrice Dalle. Kate Bush.

Who are your favourite bands?

Soft Cell. Siouxsie & the Banshees.

Depeche Mode.

What’s your favourite movie?

Betty Blue.

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MUSIC

Ginger Baker

Phil Seamen. Blind Faith. NNG. Polo. Salt. Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion Words Chris May Portrait Mattias Pettersson

The prospect of meeting Ginger Baker is a little daunting, for the drummer has a reputation for grumpiness going on bloody GBH with journalists. In the opening scene of the recent documentary

by American film director Jay Bulger, Beware Of Mr Baker, for instance, he is shown hitting his interviewer in the face with a walking stick, breaking the unfortunate man’s nose. “He’d been bugging me for months,” Baker says when I ask him about it.

But the risk is worth taking. If you think Ginger Baker is the greatest drummer Britain has ever produced, you are probably right – and in good company. Baker is scathing about practically all of his contemporaries, and cedes pole position to only one other British jazz drummer, Phil Seamen. In the 1950s, Seamen, who lived fast, and died young in 1972, 74

raised British jazz drumming to the level of Baker’s American heroes Art Blakey, Max Roach and Elvin Jones and inspired a generation of British musicians.

More than that, Seamen turned Baker on to African music with far reaching consequences for the younger man’s life and career.

“I think it was 1960 when I met Phil,” says Baker. “I was playing in the Flamingo Club [in London’s Soho] and apparently jazz saxophonist Tubby Hayes heard me and ran up the road to Ronnie Scott’s and told Phil to get down to the Flamingo and listen to the drummer. I was unaware he was there.

When I got off stage, there was God. We went back to Phil’s flat and the first thing he did was put on these African records. It was like a door opening.”

But if Baker is the greatest drummer Britain has ever produced, whatever

happened to him? For many people today, Ginger Baker starts with the formation of Cream with Eric Clapton and bassist Jack Bruce in 1966 and stops with the break-up of Cream’s short-lived successor Blind Faith in 1969. Yet Baker went on making inventive barrier-pushing music from the 1970s through the 1990s, and he is doing it again in 2013 with his latest band, Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion.

One of the things that happened was Baker’s love of life, adventure and authentic music and to hell with the consequences. In the past 40 years, while living life as though it was an extreme sport, Baker has spent lengthy periods of voluntary exile away from the hub of the music business – living in Nigeria, Italy and South Africa – making music on his own terms, growing olives, rally driving >

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and playing polo. He has lost several fortunes along the way.

Another thing that happened was heroin. “I started using it around 1958,” says Baker. “I gave it up loads of times, but I didn’t really stop until 1981.”

We meet at Baker’s home in Canterbury in Kent where Baker lives with his wife, Kudzai, and his stepdaughter, Lisa, having moved back to Britain from his previous home in Western Cape, South Africa in 2011.

Despite his reputation – and his opening gambit, “I hate fucking interviews” – Baker proves to be something of a pussycat. When he smiles, the decades fall off his face.

But there is never any doubt that he has claws. He is 73 and razor sharp.

Baker spends most of the time I am with him stretched out almost horizontally. “I’ve got degenerative osteoarthritis,” he explains. “I’m on a chronic pain management regime.

I take pills in the morning and pills in the evening. But the pain is pretty bad. Moving about is painful. It’s better if I lay down completely flat, then after a few minutes it eases off a bit.”

How does he manage to get behind a drum kit and perform or take long haul flights? His recent gig was in Japan. “The most amazing thing is that I can still play,” he says. “It’s when I stop. After a gig it’s terrible. I can hardly walk.”

Given the constant, debilitating pain, which must be doubly unwelcome to someone previously as physically active as Baker, I decide he is entitled to as much grumpiness as he likes.

Baker returned to Britain in 2011 broke, and his home, though comfortable, is quite modest, not your typical star homestead. But he has bounced back from every adversity so far, and he intends to do so again. “I ended up losing everything in South Africa,” says Baker, who took his eye off the management of his polo club while suing a local bank for fraud, in a court case that dragged on for more than three years. “So when we came over here we were very short. We had a small place in Whitstable and didn’t really have any furniture. And getting a band together takes time. Fortunately I do have a few friends. Clapton’s people 76

were very helpful. Got me over the hump when I didn’t have any money at all. They’d done it before. I paid them back before and I’m going to pay them back again.”

You could write a book about the ups and downs of Baker’s career, and Baker has: his page turner of an autobiography, Hellraiser, published in 2010. The late 1950s and 1960s on London’s jazz and R&B scene; Cream; Blind Faith; Ginger Baker’s Airforce; earning a crust with Hawkwind in the late 1970s (“decent money but they were awful”); the Baker Gurvitz Army; the outstanding albums he made with avant-funk bassist/producer Bill

‘IT WAS INCREDIBLE. THEY USED TO COME AND PUT MONEY ON MY HEAD. IT WAS A SIGN OF APPROVAL’ Laswell in the 1980s; the equally outstanding albums he made with bassist Charlie Haden and guitarist Bill Frisell in the 1990s; the Cream reunion of 2005 and more.

What I specially wanted to hear about was Baker’s 1970 to 1976 spell in Nigeria, where he recorded and performed with musician Fela Kuti, built the country’s first 16-track recording studio, set up the TransSahara Trucking Company, formed the Anglo-Nigerian band Salt, and caught the rally driving and polo bugs.

In 2012, Baker celebrated his friendship with Kuti by compiling Knitting Factory Records’ Fela: Vinyl Box Set 2, a collection of six early to mid-1970s albums, some of which Baker either played on or produced.

“Fela was a good friend of mine,” says Baker. “I met him in 1960 or 1961,

when he was in London studying at Trinity College of Music. I was playing in the Flamingo jazz all-nighters. It was like a rhythm section – me, sometimes Johnny Burch, sometimes Gordon Beck on piano, Tony Archer on bass. It was like a free blow for horn players. Fela was playing trumpet then and he’d come and sit in.” Kuti was a good trumpet player. “Yeah. He was a better trumpeter than he was a tenor saxophonist or keyboard player.

“The next time I saw him was in 1970 at the Afro Spot in Lagos. I was totally blown away by Africa 70. I don’t dance but I just had to dance to Fela’s stuff.”

Kuti’s tenor saxophonist in 1970 was the remarkable Igo Chico, who left Africa 70 in 1973 following an argument. In response, Kuti swore he would learn the instrument and play it onstage himself within 24 hours, and he did.

“Igo Chico was a great player,” agrees Baker. “He was really good. The Africa 70 band was the best band Kuti ever had. Plus the stuff Kuti was doing then was extremely humorous – the album Gentleman and tracks like ‘Lady’ and ‘Mattress’ – laughter was very much part of Nigerian life in Lagos in the 1970s. I’d hang out at Fela’s compound, which he later called Kalakuta Republic, and we’d smoke lots and lots of NNG [Nigerian Natural Grass]. I was a member of the Kalakuta Party – yeah, the only white man – we used to sit round the Africa Table, which was a table in the shape of Africa. I was on the committee there for a couple of years.”

When Baker played with Africa 70, how did Nigerian audiences take to a white drummer? Baker smiles. “It was incredible. They used to come and put money on my head. It was sign of approval. I did a few gigs when Tony Allen [Kuti’s drummer from 1968 to 1978] was sick. People just couldn’t believe it. Oyinbo [white man] drummer! It’s very complex, the African thing, if you want to analyse it. But it’s a feel, the African 12/8 feel, and you’ve got players who think, and players who feel, and I’m a feeler. I’m well loved in Nigeria; still am today.”

Through his connections in Britain, Baker set up a tour of the country for Kuti and Africa 70 in 1971. “That tour

MUSIC | Ginger Baker would have really made Fela here,” says Baker. “We were going to start with a BBC television special, then do 14 universities, and end with an ITV special. It was all sorted out. I’d got it all organised. But unfortunately, it got fucked up.”

The tour unravelled a couple of days before Kuti and the band were due to fly into Britain from Nigeria. “I was due to go back and collect the band on Monday,” says Baker, “but on Saturday I got a call from Immigration at Heathrow. They said, ‘We’ve got this guy Louis, he’s got no luggage, just a big drum, and he says he’s come here to join your band and please can you come down?’ When I get there, I find they’ve busted this guy with 35lb of ganja in the drum. He’d told Customs that he’d been instructed by Fela to deliver it to me or [Baker names a friend of Kuti’s still living in London].

I’d never seen him before, didn’t know who the fuck he was.”

Customs took Baker back to his flat, found a little weed, and busted him.

“They knew the guy had been sent by Kuti, and they’d been trying to catch [Kuti’s friend] for ages. He’d been happily selling Nigerian grass for years.

But he was a clever guy, he’d got two passports. So when they charged him and confiscated his passport, he just booked a ticket on his other one and went back to Nigeria.

“Fela had sent this guy Louis so he would have money when he got here.

But it was so stupidly done, so obvious.

One guy, no luggage, a fucking great drum stuffed with grass. If Fela had come to England then they would have arrested him as soon as he landed. The African thing didn’t really hit over here until 20 or 30 years later. But if Fela had done that tour in 1971 it would have been a different story.”

Baker has some great dope stories.

Once, when he was driving across the Sahara desert from Nigeria to Britain – a round trip he made 10 times between 1970 and 1976 – he was carrying a few pounds of Nigerian grass to give to friends back home. “I didn’t want to chance it with all that dope,” he says, “so we took a really out of the way route, because the border posts were all on the bigger roads.

Somewhere between Agadez [in Niger] and Tamanrasset [in Algeria] we drove past a French Foreign Legion fort and there was a colonel standing outside in full dress uniform and make-up. Mascara, lipstick, blusher… an amazing sight. He saluted and smiled at us as we drove past.”

In those pre-GPS days, wasn’t it pretty hairy driving across the Sahara, whatever luggage you were carrying?

“Not really,” says Baker casually.

“There’d be maybe a couple of Range Rovers and, depending on the route, we had a truck with something like 300 jerry cans of petrol on it. So when you stopped for a brew up, you brewed

Windsor Festival 1966. David Redfern

up about 200 yards from the vehicles.

The fastest I did that trip was seven days. I left London on a Friday morning and got to Lagos at night the following Friday. The truck trip took a bit longer. We went a long route with the truck, through Mali.

There’s several ways across.”

Baker’s time in Nigeria ended when Batakota Studios, the state-of-the-art recording studio he built largely with his own money, was forced out of business by his bigger rivals EMI and Decca. “After we opened,” says Baker, “I was at a party in Lagos that EMI had thrown for Paul McCartney [who recorded part of his album Band On The Run at Batakota]. A guy comes up to me, grey haired, pinstripe suit, the works, says, ‘Ginger Baker?’ I say, ‘Yeah’. He says, ‘I’m the managing director of EMI

Overseas and I want you to know we’re going to screw you, you can’t have a studio here, it’s our territory.’ We couldn’t record 95 per cent of the artists in West Africa, they were all under contract to EMI or Decca and they wouldn’t let them use my studio. On top of that, we had to have our records pressed in England and flown out, because EMI and Decca froze us out of RMNL [Records Manufacturers Nigeria Ltd], the only pressing plant, which they co-owned.

I was losing money instead of making money. In the end I lost the studio, everything. It was all down to EMI.” Baker bounced back, just like he did when he lost another pile in the US, and just like he intends to do now. First up must be a recording deal for Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion, which cannot be far off. Another Cream reunion and disc spin-offs, which are again being rumoured, would put him nicely in the black. But don’t hold your breath on that one.

Meanwhile, Baker is doing it the hard way, with his band. “You know, it’s like starting from the bottom again.

But the band’s going well, we’re beginning to get known. The last record I did was in 1997 – the last of three jazz CDs I did in the States.

There was critical acclaim. All three got raving reviews and got on the Billboard jazz chart. But you get on the Billboard jazz chart by selling 350 copies a week. You get on the pop chart when you’re selling 350,000 copies a week.

“I’ve still got royalties coming in, but they’re not great any more, because it’s so long ago. But with that and working with this band, we’re just about keeping our heads above water. Still haven’t got a car though.

“And there’s the film Beware Of Mr Baker. Hopefully that will also earn some money. I haven’t seen it. I went to the opening in London but I had lunch while it was being shown – it would be too painful to watch, seeing myself losing everything. I went on stage after the screening though and got an amazing standing ovation. It was very well received.” bewareofmrbaker.com 77

MUSIC

Shuggie Otis

Johnny Otis. Strawberry Letter 23. Frank Zappa. The Rolling Stones Words Paolo Hewitt Portrait Pelle Crepin

Here comes Shuggie Otis, drifting towards me along a corridor at Sony Records in west London like a mysterious dream. His clothes are black.

His shoes are deeply polished. His hair is slicked upwards. He has a deep moustache, and his face is a compelling mix of Afro-American and Greek blood.

With a bit of Tunisian thrown in.

I am late but he is polite. “Hey, no problem,” he says as I apologise for my tardiness. But it is a problem. A lot of people want to talk to Otis today.

And that is because, like me, they are completely intrigued by the man.

Not only do they want to know what happened to the 12-year-old boy who played guitar with his dad, the bandleader, Johnny Otis, and then as a youngster made three albums of startling originality before disappearing, but they also want to try to fathom what it is that makes this man tick.

Otis’s albums made between the ages of 16 and 21, Here Comes Shuggie Otis (1969), Freedom Flight (1971) and Information Inspiration (1974), mark his extraordinary progress.

On his first album his influences, soul to funk to pop, R&B to jazz, are laid bare. On his second, the title track alone is worth the admission price.

‘Freedom Flight’ is an amazing 12-minute sonic excursion propelled not only by a wild imagination but a deep and very impressive melding of jazz to psychedelia.

On his third LP, Information Inspiration in 1974, Otis truly hits his stride, sculpting a style and sound that he channels most vividly through the songs ‘Aht Uh Mi Hed’ and the title track.

His greatness lies not only in his astonishing musical talents – please seek out his acoustic jam on YouTube 78

with Frank Zappa from 1970 – but also in his choice of instrumentation to colour his songs. On ‘Aht Uh Mi Hed’ he uses a drum machine, deep bass, orchestral strings and a jaunty keyboard riff to help the song switch seamlessly from funk to pop – in a verse. He also deploys backing vocals with brilliant precision.

On the aforementioned Freedom Flight he uses a delayed guitar that is then joined by an oboe. Listen to ‘Strawberry Letter 23’ (that the R&B duo The Brothers Johnson made their anthem) and you’ll hear a glockenspiel and acoustic guitars that provide the perfect setting for his psychedelic lyrics.

It was in the 1990s when I first heard Otis and like most people I flipped over this unique talent. In fact, I flipped so much that I went into Epic Records one lunchtime and wrote the head of the company a drunken note demanding he let me put together an Otis compilation.

I never got a reply but if that guy is still around, he will no doubt be overjoyed that Sony are now releasing two Otis albums simultaneously.

The first is Information Inspiration, which is accompanied by four unreleased tracks from the sessions.

One of those tracks ‘Walking Down A Country Road’ was one of my favourite songs of 2012, a rich stew of Beach Boys harmonies set to a striking musical backdrop, filled with a deep bass and an ethereal vocal.

The second album Wings Of Love features 13 songs that Otis wrote between 1975 and 2000, when he was out of public view. On that subject Otis is keen to clear up all misunderstandings.

“I never wanted to not do it,” Otis tells me. “That is the misconception

about me. People think I had left show business. No. When I got dropped from Epic Records I went to every label imaginable and got the thumbs down, for years. I know it has been very confusing because people say, ‘You were so popular. What happened?’

“People thought I had gotten afraid or something. I was never afraid. There was a point when I wanted a break from the business but that was a short period of a couple of years. When I got dropped by Epic that did not bother me at all. When my father told me I almost laughed it off. He looked depressed but I said, ‘Don’t worry – we’ll have a record deal in two weeks,’” Otis recalls laughing. “So 20 years later… it’s kind of funny to me now.

See, I never got bitter about Epic Records dropping me; I was bitter about everyone else knowing who I was and not accepting me, but not with Epic Records.”

It seems incredible that a talent such as Otis’s could have been ignored by every company in town once Epic had dumped him. It does not make sense. Here is an exquisite musician and songwriter. What’s not to like? As people so annoyingly chant these days.

Otis shrugs his shoulders. “I went to every record label in the world and got nowhere. It was kind of baffling to me given all the attention that I had gotten before. I used to wonder, ‘Am I too old now? Is that it? Hang on, I’m only 21.’”

He chuckles to himself and continues, “It never saddened me. Sure it did make me a little angry for a minute but I mostly laughed at it. Apparently, someone did not want me in the business. When I was told this I felt a chill go up my spine. I think there is some truth to it. I’ve heard several stories but I am not going to tell them. >

But I’m back. I have got my own record label Shugiterius, so now I call the shots.”

Otis was born Johnny Alexander Veliotes Jr on 30 November 1953.

“I think he was underrated,” Otis says of his late father, Johnny Otis. “He came up with some good stuff. He had a jazz band in the 1940s, and had a big hit with ‘Harlem Nocturne’. That was back in the day when if you went into a studio, it was a one-take deal. Imagine somebody trying to do that today.”

Deeper examination reveals that Otis’s father was a man driven to break down barriers. He was the son of Greek immigrants who grew up in a black neighbourhood and absorbed everything on offer and wanted to be part of the cool subculture. “As a kid,” he once said, “I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black.”

This instinct to avoid categorisation was later passed on to Otis Jr. It is one of the ingredients that makes his music so fascinating.

Johnny Otis led an all-black band, is credited with recording the first R&B mambo song ‘Mambo Boogie’, wrote ‘Every Beat Of My Heart’ (1951), which Gladys Knight obligingly took into the charts in 1961, wrote ‘Willie And The Hand Jive’ (Eric Clapton covered it in 1974) and discovered, among others, the great vocalists Jackie Wilson and Little Esther Phillips.

He was later given his own radio show, TV variety show and went into politics. He also managed and produced his son.

Otis’s mother Phyllis was an Afro-American and it was her close friend Marie Brown who nicknamed him Sugar as a baby. The sobriquet eventually mutated into Shuggie.

“My mother is African American and her mother was black and Filipino,” he tells me. “Her father died when she was two years old so maybe my dad was like a father figure to her. But then again, she controlled everything. No matter how much hollering he did.

He could be pretty rude but I would never talk back. I would think that’s his wife, she knows how to put up with him and she could scare him badly.”

I ask him if it’s true that he was playing the guitar at the age of two.

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“Hell, no,” he chuckles. “Would not have been able to pick the damn thing up, for one thing. I had a drum set when I was four and I banged around on it. I got to know the beat but I gave it up after several years.

Then, I got interested in the guitar.

The Beatles came out and I wanted to play. My first influence was seeing Jimmy Nolen with his big Gibson guitar in the late 1950s, which he had put red sparkles on. I have always been fascinated by guitars.”

It’s interesting to note the influence of The Beatles – and many other bands – on Otis’s work. Back in the 1970s, America’s music scene was divided along race lines. Black over

TO PERFORM IN CERTAIN CLUBS, THE 14-YEAR-OLD OTIS WORE GLASSES TO LOOK OLDER AND ESCAPE ATTENTION here, white over there. Thanks to the pioneering work of bands such as The Isley Brothers, Sly And The Family Stone, and individuals such as Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, a concerted effort was made to break down those musical restrictions.

Otis was at the forefront of this, however, I don’t think this was a conscious move on his part, more an artistic decision. Frankly, the boredom factor soon sets in if he confines himself to one sound, one style.

“I would get bored if I had to do one thing,” he confirms. “I like all kinds of music, especially classical. And R&B. Rock ’n’ roll. Blues. And jazz. But I am really into classical music these days.”

The nearest Otis got to real chart success came with his composition ‘Strawberry Letter 23’ (1977). It was

also a key song in creating his album Information Inspiration.

Up until this point Otis had been produced and managed by his father.

Recognising his child’s formidable musical talents, Johnny had given his son a place in his band. To perform in certain clubs, the 14-year-old Otis wore glasses to look older and escape the attention of nightclub owners.

After one gig a writer noted Otis’s amazing guitar playing. “We got a rave review from Down Beat magazine and that got me attention from the major record labels,” Otis reveals.

“In the end it came down to Columbia and RCA. Columbia outbid them so that’s who we went with. The first album I did there was Super Session with Al Kooper, then we went to work on a Johnny Otis album Cuttin’ Up – originally called Watts Breakaway.”

The original album cover for the latter featured a cartoon of the six-day Watts riots that took place in Los Angeles in 1965, but Columbia baulked at the image. Instead, they used a photo of Otis lying on a hospital bed about to be operated upon. Cutting up. Geddit?

With a deal in place Otis went to work on his debut solo album. “I needed a bit of help on the first album and the second as well,” he explains.

I tell Otis that one of my favourite songs of his is the jaw-dropping ‘Freedom Flight’.

“Thank you,” he says modestly. “I like it. I am not a bragger but that tune is special to me. It was actually in my head pretty much formed but the arrangement came out differently. It was my dad’s idea to turn down the whole band and have just the guitar going through the Leslie amp with an oboe and using delay. It just knocked me out. I said, ‘Man, my dad has got some way-out ideas.’ He also arranged that classical part on my song ‘Oxford Gray’. He sang all the parts to the arranger. I was in the room, sitting right next to the arranger on the piano.

My dad sang all those notes to him and the horn parts too.”

I knew his father had exerted influence on Otis but didn’t realise how much...

“Oh we were real tight when I was young, all the way up until I was about 19 years old. That was when I started

MUSIC | Shuggie Otis going out on my own. I could drive, so we didn’t hang out so much. And that was when we got into some real fights.

Not physically but mentally; he could be cruel. But he always won me back.”

Otis and his father were falling out around the time he was dropped by Epic Records. Otis was also producing himself by now. His dad had left him to produce the cryptic ‘Strawberry Letter 23’, and Epic was so impressed by the results, it handed Otis the production role for his next album.

The deal for the album was negotiated by Otis’s dad.

“He did not want cash,” Otis tells me. “Instead, he wanted to have a studio built in the backyard. Very slick, my father. My sister’s first husband was a builder, and he, along with a few other people, put it together. I needed to get the feel of the place first.

“I did not start on the tracks. I was still kind of lazy getting to it. Actually, not lazy. A lot of the time I wanted to get into the studio, I would come out of my bedroom, come through the living room, and turn right to go out there, and I would hear a band playing. My dad would be in there, recording – hogging the studio. It was his studio.

Like I say, he was pretty slick.”

One of Inspiration Information’s most defining characteristics is Otis’s use of drum machine. This instrument was first heard to great effect on American R&B singer Timmy Thomas’s huge 1973 hit single ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’. Sly Stone also used it brilliantly on There’s A Riot Goin’ On from the same year.

Otis claims that although he created a distinctive sound it was of no consequence to him. Back then, you were expected to make a different sound if you were serious about music.

“Sometimes, the music comes out my head,” Otis explains. ‘Sometimes, I hear licks in my sleep. For example, on ‘Sparkle City’ the first two guitar verses, I heard in a dream. Same on ‘Black Belt Sheriff ’, I had two verses down before I opened my eyes. That dream was about my younger brother Derek who was killed.

“He had gotten into trouble and he was handcuffed in a room in Santa Monica police station. He knew how

to get out of handcuffs – he must have had a hairpin or something – anyway, he and his friend made a run for it. The station had a long corridor – it would take you a long time to run down it – and they shot him in the back.

“I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time with him. I met him when I was about 23 years old. He was a bad boy.

On the other hand, he suffered from schizophrenia, which I also have. It’s not a bad thing, in fact it’s quite common.

Some people think it’s a double personality but it is not that at all.

It’s mood swings.”

I mention that I have known a lot of musicians and many of them suffer from it. “Especially,” adds Otis. “the

ones who are really serious and creative.

They go nuts. I know I have.

Sometimes, you want to write but you can’t because you do not have the inspiration. That is why I practice more these days. Back then I was just trying to come up with songs with the ability I had. Now, I am more interested in building up my chops. I also want to get better on the piano. My dad left me a real good piano.”

After Inspiration Information failed to get Otis a deal, he got a big, fat no all over town. During this long period of isolation Otis continued writing, and it is the best of that material that we will hear on the forthcoming album Wings Of Love.

Meanwhile, I wonder if he got jealous of others who were forging a similar

musical path to him while he was struggling? Such as Prince.

“The first time I heard Prince’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ in 1979 I asked, ‘Who is this?’” Otis says, “I loved that song. I was driving to my girl’s house and it came on the radio and at the end of the song it went into this real cool vamp. And I thought that reminds me of my stuff. I like his stuff but they are always pitting us cos I think we look like each other. If we did not look alike I don’t think we would be comparable.”

It was the advent of the internet that finally alerted Otis to his popularity around the world.

Initially, he was shocked by his fan’s devotion. Then he stopped looking. Typically of this modest man, he did not want his ego affected by the messages and notes.

“It wasn’t until I got a computer that I realised this was going on. It was then that I noticed people were praising me,” he reveals. “I said, ‘Wow, I thought everyone had forgotten about me.’ But I had to stop reading it – I couldn’t read praise about myself all day. All you are doing is feeding your ego. I read a few of them and I said, ‘That’s enough,’ because those comments are so intense.

I remember one in particular saying, ‘Where are you Shuggie? We need you.’

When I saw that it rang a bell in my head. See, I always knew I would get back into show business I just did not know when, and so finally, I got myself together cos I was addicted to drugs for a long time and when finally I got straight, my chops came back. Instead, of playing for a minute or two a day, I was playing for hours.”

The press officer at Sony enters the room we’re in. The world is waiting for Otis. I end the interview and Otis graciously thanks me. I ask him to do me a favour.

“Don’t go on the missing list again,” I implore him. He smiles and says, “No chance of that now.”

The double CD release of Inspiration Information and Wings of Love by Shuggie Otis is due out in April through Sony. Shuggie Otis is on a worldwide tour.

He will be in the UK in May 2013 81

James wears jacket by Paul Smith; trousers

by Brooks Brothers; shirt by Mr Bathing Ape.

STYLE

Scott wears jacket by Peter Werth; trousers by Dockers; shirt by Gant Rugger; tie by Paul Smith; pocket square, stylist’s own. James wears jacket

by Peter Werth; jeans and sweater by Brooks Brothers; shirt by Mr Bathing Ape; bow tie by Paul Smith. Jamie wears jacket by Mr Bathing Ape; trousers by Gap; sweater by Polo Ralph Lauren; shirt by Paul Smith; pocket square, stylist’s own.

Kappa Delta Phi Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Mark Anthony Fraternity Jamie Parr, James Pogson and Scott Simpson Location The Geffrye Museum geffrye-museum.org.uk

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Scott wears jacket by Mr Start; trousers by Dockers; shirt by Polo Ralph Lauren; tie by Gant Rugger; shoes, model’s own.

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STYLE | Kappa Delta Phi

Jamie wears jacket and waistcoat by Paul Smith; trousers by Peter Werth; shirt by Mr Bathing Ape; socks and shoes, model’s own.

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Scott wears jacket by Polo Ralph Lauren; sweater by Brooks Brothers; shirt by Dockers; tie by Gant Rugger. Jamie wears sweatshirt by Human Made; jacket by Peter Werth.

STYLE | Kappa Delta Phi

Jamie wears jacket by Mr Bathing Ape; trousers by Dockers; shirt by Brooks Brothers; belt by Paul Smith; pocket square, stylist’s own.

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Scott wears jacket by Peter Werth; trousers

by Paul Smith; shirt by Gap; bow tie by Polo Ralph Lauren; bag by Oliver Spencer.

STYLE | Kappa Delta Phi

James wears jacket by Oliver Spencer; trousers by Dockers; shirt by Crew Clothing. Scott wears jacket and waistcoat

by Polo Ralph Lauren; trousers by Farah; shirt by Original Penguin. Jamie wears jacket and sweater by Brooks Brothers; trousers by Peter Werth; shirt by Gant Rugger.

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CULTURE

Jamel Shabazz Street photography. Brooklyn. Hip hop. Black Muslims. President Obama Interview Chris Sullivan Portrait Janette Beckman

Jamel Shabazz’s photographs celebrate the individual and are taken with nothing short of love, empowering the subject with dignity. Sometimes pigeonholed as a hip hop photographer, Shabazz is so much more. He is a social documentarian whose work is governed by a curiosity in other people and the community around him. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1960, he has enjoyed countless exhibitions and he has published four books showing New York life and street style, in particular Back In The Days, which documents the emerging hip hop scene in the 1980s.

How did you get started?

I was introduced to photography by way of my father’s massive library. As a photographer, he had a huge collection 90

of books. As a young boy, I was drawn to this amazing collection. Included in his library were books on war photography, nude, fine art photography, and various books on techniques, themes and social commentary. I would spend hours soaking it all up. A few years later I picked up my first camera, which was my mother’s inexpensive Kodak Instamatic that she was no longer using.

I took this camera into my junior high school and started documenting my friends. Having a camera gave me a purpose and I fell in love with the craft.

As time passed, my father noticed my interest in photography and would ask to see my photographs. He became my biggest critic, trashing all of the images that I thought were good. In the process he guided me into understanding the

science of photography and light and composition. My father instructed me in the field of fine art and landscape photography and once I received my first enlarger, he taught me the art of printing. Unfortunately, he passed away before seeing the fruits of his labour, but his influence is reflected in much of my work.

What does the perfect photo achieve?

The perfect photograph captures your attention and stimulates thought.

Is photography instinctive or are there rules that can be learnt?

For me, it is a combination. Principles and rules are necessary to understand the essence of the craft. Instincts develop over time. >

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Tune It Or Die Lower Eastside, New York 1997

Style And Finesse Harlem, New York 2010 Too Fly Soho, New York

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CULTURE | Jamel Shabazz

The Future Harlem, New York 1997

Do you think the art of black and white photography is in the darkroom?

I miss the darkroom. Back in the day, I would go into my darkroom at midnight and print until 6am.

Digital or film?

I started working with a Canon 5D digital SLR five years ago and love digital photography. However I still have an appreciation for film.

At times, I also shoot with a Contax G2 rangefinder for my black and white photography.

A photographer friend of mine claims that photography was a different discipline with film as he couldn’t afford to shoot too much, but nowadays you can shoot thousands of shots on digital. So by law of averages one has to be right. What’s your opinion?

Your friend is absolutely right and I wish I had a digital camera in the 1980s. Back then, I had to monitor every shot I took and make sure that every image counted, as there was little room for error. That was when the training kicked in and you made it your

business to make sure your shutter speed and aperture settings were correct. In addition, you always checked how many frames you had left. I can’t remember the number of times I ran out of film while shooting in the street.

Why do you think the stills discipline has endured even though video cameras are so cheap and even installed on mobile phones?

That’s a good question. I am still trying to figure that out. Personally, I am seeing the results of video footage captured by mobile phones and digital cameras and I’m very impressed. I grew up looking at still images, amassing thousands of my own, so it’s still embedded in me.

However one of my goals for 2013 is to start utilising my digital cameras to make short documentaries. For me that will be the next level.

What are your favourite photographs?

Ormond Gigli’s Girls In The Windows (1960); Leonard Freed’s photograph of two Harlem kids playing with a fire hydrant in 1963; Afghan Girl by Steve McCurry (1984).

Does this hip hop photographer pigeonhole annoy you?

Not really but I like to explain that I am not a hip hop photographer. My work is centred on documentary, fine art and fashion. I just happened to document a time when hip hop became popular. The foundation of my work is based on everyday people.

I consider myself a documentarian of diverse cultures.

What so fascinated you with people?

It’s the idea that everyone has a story that is unique and when I engage my subjects in conversation – from the inspiring young photographer to the war veteran – it is always an intriguing exchange.

How did you get involved with the emerging hip hop scene?

It stems from me being around during its inception. One of the first groups I saw perform was the Disco Enforcers in 1975. It was some of the best. Coming out of the Red Hook housing projects in south Brooklyn, they used to jam during the summer, hooking up their > 93

Father & Son East Flatbush, New York 2010

equipment to the lamppost in Coffey Park. Playing for hours, they would draw hundreds of people, young and old, from near and far. It was the first time I heard someone rhyme to a beat and I was mesmerised. The classic show stopper was ‘Love Is The Message’ by MFSB (1973). The park was full of positive energy.

What’s the cultural legacy of hip hop?

It has become a universal language and transcended race. I would never have imagined 30 years ago that young suburban teens would embrace hip hop with such fervour or that it would become a multibillion dollar enterprise.

Does anything compare with it now?

Like hip hop, graffiti became a form of self-expression in the 1970s. It was also rejected by the mainstream society.

Today there are countless graffiti artists across the colour line that have made major headway into the art world and 94

are making millions of dollars as well as exhibiting in galleries around the world.

I can remember when sneakers were considered footwear for robbers – for a fast run away. Now everyone wears them. Can you recall the sneaker evolution?

Back in the early 1970s in New York most of us wore Pro-Keds Sixty-Niners; they cost less than $20. It was only white kids or professional basketball players who wore the classic Puma Clyde. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Puma, adidas, and Nike became the footwear of many in my community.

In the late 1980s you started seeing variations in style along with a drastic shift in price.

What’s the essential hip hop sneaker?

Back in the day, it was the classic shelltoed adidas. However at the age of 52, I cannot tell you what’s worn today for I am now more inclined to wear shoes.

What do you think of hip hop style now?

Since the evolution of hip hop via music videos and publications, artists have been influential in how young people fashion themselves. In the US, in the 1970s and 1980s, you could have a sense of which region a person came from by his style of dress. Today everyone looks similar; there is no real difference between how people dress on the East Coast or West Coast.

In 2008 I attended a R16 Korea B-Boy competition in Suwon, South Korea and there were B-boys from all over the globe – Russia, Brazil, China, Japan, Germany, France, Africa – everyone looked so similar, you would not know specifically where anyone came from.

That was when I realised the influence of hip hop around the world.

Who’s the most influential DJ? Jam Master Jay, who died in 2002, and Grandmaster Flash. >

One Love Soho New York, 2000

Urban Beauty Lower Eastside, New York 2005

Fahamu Pecou New York 2010

Kid Freeze Harlem, New York 1994

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Gentlemen of Leisure Soho, New York 2009

Drama And Flava Paris 2008

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CULTURE | Jamel Shabazz

East Flatbush, New York 1980

What do you think of gangster rap?

It is a direct result of the crack epidemic; a reality for some and a fantasy for others. Regardless of what the critics feel, gangster rap is a reflection of an aspect of society and no different from the influence of violent movies, television programmes and video games that so many in the world embrace.

What was New York like in the disco and the funk days?

During the heyday of disco I was living in Germany, serving in the US Army.

Since most of the military personnel on my base came from the South and West Coast, funk music was very popular.

Having a love for music, I embraced funk and some of my favourite groups were Con Funk Shun, War, ParliamentFunkadelic, The Gap Band, and Frankie Beverly and Maze. Disco was rarely played in the clubs on my base, but I bought albums and recorded them on my Pioneer 707 reel to reel tapes, which I still have today.

In Los Angeles in 1978, I remember seeing pimp-style – shades, fedora, fur and bling… Did you shoot any that?

I did photograph a few pimps. My hope was that one day they would wake up and see the damage they were contributing to the

Masons Harlem, New York 2010

community. We can put hate on the pimps, but consider the pornographers who also contribute to the exploitation of women.

What was your upbringing like?

I had a pretty decent upbringing. I lived in a two parent household and I was fortunate to have eight uncles and six aunts and plenty of cousins. Family was everything to me. In my pre-teen years I attended catholic school where I learned about various cultures. I enjoyed sports, primarily football, and I was inspired to play the bass guitar after seeing The Jackson 5 on TV. Having a profound love for history, I would get lost in books at home and at the local library. Around 15 years old my hormones started working overtime and I became attracted to quite a few girls, and I was introduced to the art of kissing on the back staircase at school.

Eventually, this endeavour would cause me to cut school and engage in a little deeper activity at home while my parents were out at work. When not entertaining my girlfriends, I would be with my graffiti crew “redecorating” local establishments and school yards with our tags. I was KANGO. Despite having a good graff name, I decided to trade my spray paint can for my mother’s camera. It became my compass, setting me on a different path, > 97

enabling me to see and create and, of course, take pictures of my girlfriends.

Tell me about the rise of the black Muslims in the United States and its significance.

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is one of the oldest black organisations in America, founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard in Detroit, Michigan.

Fard saw black Americans as lost sheep in need of a true knowledge of self, in order to be uplifted from a mental slavery that kept blacks economically dependent upon whites. He taught the need to abstain from drugs, alcohol, and poisonous foods. In addition, he stressed the importance of building schools, hospitals and acquiring farmland so that blacks could be independent. While in Detroit, he met Elijah Pool; a small man with a third grade education.

Fard spent three and a half years teaching Pool, who eventually changed his surname to Muhammad.

Upon Fard’s departure Pool built a strong organisation of more than 50,000 black people throughout America. Islam, under the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, gave hope to black people. The NOI was one of the few organisations that was able to transform the lives of countless young men and women. Today, the NOI, under the direction of Minister Louis Farrakhan, is still active.

What do you think of Melvin Van Peebles’ assertion that the CIA deliberately allowed crack and smack to infiltrate the ghettos to undermine community action?

It would not surprise me. Considering that when we look at the war in Vietnam and how America was made to believe that North Vietnam attacked an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.

That put the United States government in an unjustifiable war that took the lives of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese.

Look at Iraq and all the misinformation about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction that led us to war. Both incidents were based 98

on lies and we are just finding out the truth now. So, anything is possible.

When it came out in the 1960s that the United States army was experimenting on its soldiers by giving them LSD, no one believed it. Now after 50 years that truth is coming to light. As for the issue of crack, I believe that the truth will also come out.

What do you think about Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier?

This is a great question. I can vividly recall the first fight between Ali and Frazier at Madison Square Garden in 1971. I remember disliking Ali because of the way he belittled Frazier; calling him a “gorilla” and “ugly”.

‘THE PERFECT PHOTOGRAPH CAPTURES YOUR ATTENTION AND STIMULATES THOUGHT’ It pained me hearing these words from a man who had so many profound things to say. For me, it was bad enough that two black men were going into a ring, but the degradation really troubled me. I recall an interview a few years back with Frazier in which he stated how much he was pained by the way Ali berated him for all those years. You could tell from his facial expression that he never got over the taunting and that the psychological scars still seemed present. My respect for Ali derived from his position on the Vietnam war and the issue of injustice in America. I admired him for standing up on national television and expressing his political, social and religious beliefs with no fear. What made him

most impressive was the fact that he was only in his twenties.

What’s your opinion of Obama?

President Obama is the captain of a crippled vessel.

What do you think about the second amendment especially in view of the continued gun crime in the United States?

I feel American people have a right to bear arms to protect their property and themselves. However, the leadership of this government needs to intervene and address the issue of violent programming that is affecting the population and start cultivating a society that resolves conflict through violence. In addition, guns should not be sold to people who are mentally unstable.

What do you think has been the greatest black musical contribution since music was recorded?

Philadelphia International Records under the leadership of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. They were both musical geniuses, producing some of the greatest, inspiring songs of the 1970s.

And the artist who has made the biggest contribution?

Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On (1971) was a courageous move to produce an album that addressed the Vietnam war, poverty and pollution.

That album sold more than two million copies and provoked a lot of thought.

What do you listen to now?

I listen to a wide range of music from classic R&B, jazz, reggae, salsa, hip hop, classical and traditional Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese music.

What are your future plans?

I am working on a series of new books; a book based on my black and white documentary work and another centred on the 1990s. I also plan to start working on a few short documentaries based on conversations with many of my subjects. jamelshabazz.com

CULTURE | Jamel Shabazz Represent Harlem, New York 2010

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CINEMA

Film Noir

Berlin. Femme Fatale. Los Angeles. Nino Frank. Dashiell Hammett. Barbara Stanwyck Words Chris Sullivan

It is inconceivable to imagine life without film noir. Indeed, I both pity and envy those who have yet to sit down to this particularly sumptuous feast as, on one hand, they don’t know what they’re missing, and on the other, they have a veritable smorgasbord of celluloid delights in front of them: wise cracking private dicks, badass criminals, beleaguered leading men ushering in their own demise, and the feisty femme fatale who drags him into her subterranean world where all bets are off and scruples are decidedly old fashioned. And that is just the beginning. Noir splits itself into sub categories: there’s the amnesia and nightmare noir, gangster, heist, woman in distress noir, grifter, runaway, psycho, gothic, docu-noir (which often uses real crime footage), prison noir, fantasy noir and occult noir, 100

many of which overlap. What they all have in common is that we, the audience, know that things aren’t going to work out at all well. It’s just a matter of when and how. Put simply, noir occupies a massively important place in cinema history.

Even though all will agree that the form is perceived as a fundamentally American cinematic genre, the term “noir” was in fact coined by French publisher Marcel Duhamel. He formed his publishing company, Editions Gallimard, with the sole intention of printing all the hard boiled crime novels by the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, Chester Himes, Jim Thompson and James M Cain, which were unavailable in France during the war and sorely needed a Gallic airing.

Thus, in 1945, Série Noire was born.

The name not only meant “black series”, but was also a play on words, in that “une série noire” also describes a succession of dire events.

Said series of books was a great success and the following year, Nino Frank, an Italian born film critic living in Paris, attached the title “film noir” to all the early 1940s American crime movies that also, thanks to Nazi occupation, were only now being seen in France. A moniker that matched Gallimard’s series of books, it not only tells of the dark, brooding, pessimistic tone of films, but also describes the way they look, with many scenes occurring at night, shot in sharply contrasting black and white, where shadows reign supreme.

In America, up until the 1970s, such films were known simply as melodramas, a term defined as >

The Money Trap. 1965

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Nightmare Alley. 1947

“a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions” by the Oxford English Dictionary. Add a dash of cynicism, a soupçon of sex and a large measure of darkness, and the result is… noir.

Of course, the look of noir can be easily traced back to German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. And while some cite Robert Wiene’s silent Dr Caligari’s Cabinet (1919) as the grandaddy of noir, I’d ascribe as much to the likes of Erich Von Stroheim with Foolish Wives (1922), G W Pabst with his immensely decadent Pandora’s Box (1929) starring Louse Brooks, and F W Murnau, whose dark Sunrise (1927) is a virtual blueprint for the form. Indeed, silent directors including Sergei Eisenstein, 102

Tod Browning and Carl Dreyer employed the gothic tones, outdoor night-time locations and Expressionist camera angles that later epitomised the form. It was only when talkies came along that banality and studio shoots took over because with the necessity to static microphones and the noise of the camera machinery, when on location it was impossible to get good quality on the dialogue. That said, as much as we can tip our titfers to the silent movies, few can doubt that the noir genre was truly forged in the Berlin of the 1930s, after Germany had been ordered to pay the War Guilt Clause (269 billion gold marks, equivalent to $394 billion dollars today) to the victorious allies for the cost of the first world war. Hyperinflation ensued, three million starving orphans and widows roamed the streets, and the

difference between a prostitute and a war widow became almost negligible.

To the backdrop of the rise of the Nazi party, Berliners drank, drugged, gambled, perverted and fucked themselves into the ground, believing the end of the world was nigh. If film noir was seen as a manifestation of fear, despair and loneliness, it might be said that Berlin itself was noir’s inamorata.

Consequently, two distinctly different films set the ominously dank tone for decades to come. The first was Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (1930), which starred Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola, a raunchy, stocking clad predatory singer cum hooker working in the Blue Angel speakeasy, who attracts the attentions of an aged bachelor, Professor Rath. Like many subsequent

CINEMA | Film Noir male noir protagonists, Rath is hopelessly attracted to this femme fatale, whom he knows will never love him. As we watch his life go down the plughole, she is positively nonplussed.

Next up came the dark and disturbing M (1931), directed by the great, monocled Fritz Lang. The film stars Peter Lorre, as child murderer Hans Beckert, who loathes himself for what he does, yet can’t refrain from it. Despite giving the police clues to his identity, he evades capture, until “the safe cracker” (Gustaf Grüngens, immaculate in bowler, leather coat and gloves) meets with the conurbation’s crime lords, who organise their own man hunt and use the city’s petty crims and beggars to watch the children.

Both films epitomise noir, not only in their dark and disjointed look, but also in their subject matter. The first takes the classic noir construct that sees a man dragged down by an insatiable addiction (usually it is the femme fatale, but it might also be money, power, drugs, drink or frequently all of them together). He is a victim of both himself and his surroundings. M on the other hand takes a story in the news (Lang based the script on newspaper cuttings of a latter day child killer) and, however brutal, weaves a psychiatric maze around it that contradicts and confounds. Both films echo the early 20th century German/Austrian obsession with psychology (thanks to Freud and Jung), and both wrapped this fascination up in a yarn, allowing a glimpse into society’s nether regions and the apparent lowlifes that populated it. And lest we forget, Berlin was the world epicentre of sleaze.

It’s a fact that writers had examined the so-called lowest rung on society’s ladder previously. In France, Emile Zola’s 1880 story of a prostitute, Nana, and Francis Carco’s Perversity, which used underworld slang to describe a hooker and her pimp’s life in a 1920s Parisian slum, earned them the moniker “poetic realism”. The name was appropriated in the 1930s by Parisian filmmakers such as Jean Grémillon (La Petite Lise, 1930), Jean Vigo (L’Atalante, 1934), Julien Duvivier (Pepe Le Moko,

1937), all of whom produced remarkable movies that, although tagged “poetic realism”, strongly verged on noir.

No surprise, then, that France should provide another key to the story. After Hitler’s rise seemed unavoidable, most of the truly innovative, and mainly Jewish, filmmakers based in Berlin quickly upped and left and found a home in Paris. Their numbers included the finest exponents of the form: Anatole Litvak, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Max Ophüls and Curtis Bernhardt (who was arrested by the Gestapo and escaped within a hair’s breadth of his life). In fact the only non-Semite filmmaker who learned his trade in Berlin and left to take the noir stage was Alfred

CLASSIC NOIR SEES A MAN DRAGGED DOWN BY AN INSATIABLE ADDICTION Hitchcock. As the Nazi tanks moved south, they all realised that Europe was no place for creatives, let alone Jewish filmmakers. To the last man, they hot footed it to Hollywood, along with Duvivier, Renoir and Tourneur. It might be said that Adolf played quite a big part in the creation of film noir.

Over in the City of Angels, Von Sternberg had taken the look he’d perfected with The Blue Angel and employed it in a series of Hollywood movies starring Dietrich, the most influential of which was the thoroughly noir looking Shanghai Express (1932), while Browning’s Freaks (1932) had the look and pessimistic tone of the form. But it was Fritz Lang who led the field with his 1937 outing, You Only Live Once, starring Henry Fonda as a former

convict trying to make a go of it. John Cromwell followed with Algiers, his 1938 remake of Duvivier’s Pepe Le Moko, shot by genius cinematographer James Wong Howe, who also photographed The Sweet Smell Of Success (1957).

The jury is out as to the first noir film. My money is on the 64-minute B movie Stranger On The Third Floor (1940), starring Peter Lorre as the title’s protagonist, who somehow manages to embroil reporter Mike Ward ( John McGuire) in his grisly throat slashing antics. The story and script were written by Nathanael West and it was directed by Boris Ingster, who went onto produce The Man From UNCLE series. The film carries all the hallmarks of noir: the voiceover, an urban setting, a dream sequence and an innocent protagonist falsely accused of a crime. Shot by Nicholas Musuraca, it employed heavy shadows, off kilter low camera angles and lots of dark sets. Though less well directed, acted and scripted than its rivals, somehow Ingster’s film epitomises the noir ethic. It is dark, dank, melodramatic and more than a little barking.

The year after Stranger made its mark, the émigrés, led by Litvak (who in that year knocked out both Blues In The Night and Out Of The Fog) stormed forth. Von Sternberg made The Shanghai Gesture (starring noir queen Gene Tierney and Victor Mature), which specifically anticipated elements of classic noir, while German born director William Dieterle twisted the conceit with his sublime 1941 picture, All That Money Can Buy, which sets a classic noir yarn in 1840s New Hampshire. But in 1941, it was the Americans who made all the big noir noises. With his incomparable (though to many, not pure noir) Citizen Kane, Orson Welles influenced the milieu’s finest directors, while John Huston’s adaptation of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon was the first major film noir of the classic era that, along with High Sierra (based on the W R Burnett novel), placed Bogie at the top of the darkly monochrome ladder. Another actor, > 103

Alan Ladd, would, the next year, slip on the noir hat and raincoat and achieve fame and fortune with two classics of the genre: The Glass Key, written by Hammett, and This Gun For Hire, based on a Graham Greene story and scripted

by Burnett. Meanwhile, Ladd’s co-star, Veronica Lake, became femme fatale numero uno.

Undeniably, the time was nigh for film noir. Hard boiled crime “pulp” fiction (named so because the books were made from paper constructed from cheap wood pulp) was massively popular, while its authors lived mainly in LA eeking a living writing movie scripts. Back then, bestsellers were written by the likes of Hammett and Chandler, and Hollywood adapted them.

Their protagonists, such as the latter’s Phillip Marlowe and the former’s Sam Spade (both played

by Humphrey Bogart) were tough private detectives who passed moral judgment on what they considered an immoral society full of deadbeats.

This attitude couldn’t have been more appropriate. Previously, in the depression wasted 1930s, America had seen gangsters such as Al Capone, John Dillinger, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano hit the country’s front pages. Seeing their money, power, extravagance and anti-establishment glamour as the perfect antidote to hard times, Hollywood glorified them on the silver screen in films such as Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar of 1930, starring Edward G Robinson; William Wellman’s Public Enemy of 1931 with James Cagney; and Howard Hawks’ Scarface of 1932. And, even though said villains were undoubtedly aggrandised, the films still warned of how power and money corrupts.

But as most Americans didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, they were only too glad to see the banks, which had taken away their homes and livelihoods, robbed both in real life and on screen. This led to the creation of the National Legion of Decency, which warned against the “massacre of innocence of youth” and urged 104

a campaign for “the purification of the cinema”, which, in 1936, prompted William Wyler to helm Dead End, and Michael Curtiz to direct Angels With Dirty Faces in 1937, firmly insinuated that crime began in the slums and certainly does not pay. Ipso facto, when Hammett and Chandler popped up with their morally intact detectives, everyone, especially the studios, were as happy as sand boys.

Murder, My Sweet.1944

Using these tomes, the immigrants, particularly the Berliners, took the noir saga a quantum leap further. They had worked on shoestrings, knew exactly how to turn a dog’s balls into a fashionable wallet, and grafted all they’d learnt in their native land on to a slew of stories that might have been written for them. New, lighter cameras (produced for newsreel use in the second world war) allowed cinematographers to experiment again. Many, such as Musuraca, Wong Howe, Joseph LaShelle, Hal Mohr and George Barnes, had written the rule book for silent movies, so when noir popped up they were able to show the world just how to layer tone, light and shadow. The drop in the international film market also gave noir a surprising boost. Hollywood suffered immeasurably and budgets

were cut to zilch. Thus, darkness and shadow were put to use to mask the lack of set, while location shoots became cheaper than studio.

Necessity became the mother of invention, and Hollywood entered into its most creative period ever.

Undeniably the big year for noir was 1944, when all the elements came together and kissed each other.

Wartime cameramen, who’d honed the use of small, light cameras in the most hazardous locations, were returning home, anxious to film low budget noir. Writers such as James M Cain and Cornell Woolrich had notched up a steady stream of mainly short noir stories, while the European directors stepped up to the plate as if they’d been sitting on the substitutes bench. One of the first truly great noir movies, Double Indemnity (1944), jointly penned

by Chandler and the film’s director, Billy Wilder, was based on Cain’s 1943 novella and shot in Los Angeles.

Hot on its heels came another true classic, The Woman In The Window, directed by Fritz Lang and written

by Nunnally Johnson; the brilliant Laura, directed by Otto Preminger, based on a Vera Caspary novella; and another Chandler adaptation, Murder, My Sweet, starring crooner Dick Powell as Marlowe and directed

by Edward Dmytryk. The marriage was made and the die cast.

By the time the war was over, most of the film-watching world was noir crazy, so the studios pumped them out. The House On 92nd Street, directed by Henry Hathaway, was the first docu-noir. Made with the full co-operation of the FBI, it used real footage and allowed the public insight into a hitherto clandestine world. Thus, the last barrier was down and from now on it was no holds barred.

Noir was not only the biggest thing since the jelly donut, but it was infinitely credible, cheap to produce and darned bloody glamorous.

Consequently, almost all of the great Hollywood stars of the 1950s and 1960s made their names in noir.

Rita Hayworth became an icon after Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946);

CINEMA | Film Noir Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner became stars after Robert Siodmak’s The Killers; Lana Turner was deemed a headliner after The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), directed by the soon to be blacklisted Tay Garnett; while Jacques Tourneur’s Out Of The Past, aka Build My Gallows High, made stars out of Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas and Jane Greer. Even Marilyn Monroe got a shoe-in as Louis Calhern’s luscious mistress in The Asphalt Jungle, directed by the great noir auteur Huston, and nailed it with the Technicolor noir, Niagara (1953).

The actors were not alone. Many of the world’s finest directors cut their teeth on noir. The utterly brilliant The Set Up launched the directorial career of former editor Robert Wise; The Narrow Margin (1952) put Richard Fleischer in the driving seat; Nicholas Ray broke through with They Live By Night (the first “couple on the run” noir); Robert Aldrich’s debut was the brutal Kiss Me Deadly (1955), based on Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel. Otto Preminger was pure noir. Killer’s Kiss (1955) set Kubrick on the road to success, while the bulk of Hitchcock’s output until 1960 was noir. And lest we forget, Welles is said to have kicked the ball off with Kane and ended the golden age with Touch of Evil (1958), a film that has everything the genre can proffer. Even three of Akira Kurosawa’s earliest films are noir.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing.

Hollywood, and particularly noir, was decimated between 1947 and 1957 after the powers that be decreed that any Hollywood talent who’d been involved with the American Communist Party or any left wing organisation must be blacklisted and disallowed from working in the entertainment business. The concept (in part initiated by Walt Disney) was to limit said creatives’ ideological influence on the country. According to Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, Hollywood was “the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States”. People were dragged in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and asked to implicate colleagues. Ten men

refused to testify or name names, citing their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly, and were sentenced to a year in prison.

They included Ring Lardner Jr, who worked on Laura; Albert Maltz, who scripted This Gun For Hire and The Naked City; Dalton Trumbo, the writer of Gun Crazy (and who won two Academy Awards while blacklisted); and the aforementioned Dmytryk. The latter, on release,

Double Indemnity. 1944

IT IS THE MOST BEGUILING, CHARISMATIC AND MESMERISING CINEMA implicated some 26 colleagues, many of whom never worked again. Other friendly witnesses were director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg (whose film On The Waterfront is seen as a work created to defend their actions), and actors Lee J Cobb

and Sterling Hayden, who said in his autobiography, “I don’t think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing”. All in all, 400 people were blacklisted, including Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Chaplin, Welles, Artie Shaw and writer Dorothy Parker. Even Hammett was imprisoned for his political stance. No one with a mind was safe.

Fact was that noir (and its predecessor, poetic realism) was an egalitarian conceit and spoke of the troubles of the man on the street. Its writers were fundamentally left wing. Among those imprisoned were Algiers co-writer John Howard Lawson, the first president of the Writers Guild of America and head of the Hollywood division of the Communist Party USA (which, simply based on Marxist Leninist philosophy, initially fought for racial integration in workplaces and rights for the working man).

Many were Jewish freethinking liberals who’d seen the onslaught of the Nazis and the horrors of the second world war and reacted accordingly in both work and politics.

Curiously, one might say that film noir was prompted by one right wing regime, the Nazis, and almost killed by another: the postwar Truman (so called) Democratic administration.

Of course, not all was lost. One industry’s loss was another’s gain.

Many creatives moved to New York, where they invigorated the fledgling televsion industry, causing some of the finest TV shows and TV plays ever to be made. It has been said that the only reason pulp fiction fan, political activist and anti war campaigner Rod Serling, writer and creator of The Twilight Zone, wasn’t blacklisted was because (a) he worked in TV and (b) he was a highly decorated war hero. Indeed many blacklisted actors, such as Sam Jaffe, Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel, appeared in Serling TV productions. Others moved to Europe. Some became cab drivers.

That withstanding, between 1945 and 1960 more than 500 noir titles came out of American studios, some > 105

of which are the finest films ever made.

Over the pond, the Brits got on to it.

Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man were as good as anything that came out of Hollywood, while John Boulting’s Brighton Rock is seminal. Of course, the French were all over the concept. American born director, the blacklisted Jules Dassin, moved to France and made the staggeringly excellent Rififi (1955), an adaptation of Auguste Le Breton’s novel for which he was awarded best director at Cannes. For his superlative Casque D’Or (1952), the great Jacques Becker set the proceedings among Parisian apache gangs during La Belle Epoque, while his 1954 Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (Don’t Touch The Loot) stars the great Jean Gabin as an older, world weary gangster. In 1955 Jean Pierre Melville made Bob Le Flambeur; Louis Malle helmed Elevator To The Gallows in 1958; and in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard directed Breathless.

All of these are pure noir.

Indeed, the list of the world’s greatest ever noir reads like a list of cinema’s great triumphs.

Boorman’s Point Blank, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Polanski’s Chinatown, Scott’s Blade Runner, Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, the Coens’ Blood Simple, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and even Winding Refn’s Drive are essentially neo noir.

But the question remains: is noir a visual style, a mindset, a psychology or just a rather catch all conceit? Many books have been written on the subject, and most disagree. The truth is that whatever noir may be, it is certainly the most beguiling, charismatic and thoroughly mesmerising of all cinematic genres.

Here’s five noir movies that stretch across the great divide. Each one is a total gem that stands up as a fine film, whether noir or not.

Double Indemnity (1944) Simply a landmark achievement.

Directed by Billy Wilder, who cleverly cast the Sapphic Barbara Stanwyck as the deceitful femme fatale, Fred MacMurray as her hapless victim and Edward G Robinson 106

as the clued up investigator, this is pure unadulterated noir. From the opening credits, etched against a silhouette of a man on crutches walking towards the camera, till its smitten and soured protagonist and the narrator’s last cigarette, this is paradigmatic film noir that set the standard for all others to follow. It was nominated for seven Oscars.

Scarlet Street (1944) Following the “older guy who falls for the femme fatale who will finish him” theme, this masterpiece, based on the French novel La Chienne (The Bitch) by Georges de La Fouchardière and directed by Fritz Lang, stars Edward G Robinson as Chris Cross, a meek, amateur

NOIR SPOKE OF THE TROUBLES OF THE MAN ON THE STREET painter and cashier for a clothing retailer who saves prostitute Kitty ( Joan Bennet) after she is attacked by a man in the street. What he doesn’t know is that the attacker is Kitty’s brutish boyfriend, Johnny (Dan Duryea), and that Kitty is a chiseling bitch. But like a moth to a flame, Cross can’t get enough. What follows reveals Lang’s genius. It was temporarily banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta and New York State for erotic innuendo.

Nightmare Alley (1947) A most disturbing, contemporary and fantastic chunk of darkness based on the book by William Lindsay Gresham (who worked the Coney Island carnies), directed by Britisher Edmund Goulding and shot by Oscar winner Lee Garmes. It stars Tyrone Power as Stanton Carlisle,

a thoroughly ambitious carnie sideshow artist who, alongside phony mentalist Zeena ( Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic husband Pete, run scams a-go-go. Next to Freaks, this might be the finest evocation of the freak show in existence, especially as it hinges on the “geek”, who was a very popular carnie sideshow.

He was either an extreme heroin addict or an alcoholic who’d been turned that way by the carnie owner, and his speciality was to run around in a cage grunting like an animal, biting the heads off and then eating live chickens. He was paid in drugs or drink, usually held captive and, forever on the edge of withdrawal, kept in complete and utter delirium.

Flesh And Fantasy (1943) A portmanteau of three loosely connected stories of an occult nature, this film is one of two collections (the other is the excellent Tales Of Manhattan) directed by the under appreciated Julien Duvivier (who in 1937 set the noir tone with the superlative Pepe Le Moko). This cracking film stars Algonquin Round Table stalwart and New Yorker satirist Robert Benchley alongside Edward G Robinson, Charles Boyer and a barrage of great character actors.

The Devil And Daniel Webster (1941) Directed by the utterly brilliant William Dieterle, who previously excelled with The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and went on to helm the landmark Portrait Of Jennie, this film, although set in the 1800s, ticks every single category box in blood red ink. The Faustian tale of one Jabez Stone, who finds Mr Scratch, aka the Devil (beautifully rendered by Maltese Falcon director John Huston’s father Walter) chilling in his barn. Old Nick offers the poor Jab all the money and possessions he might ever want in exchange for his soul. He even throws in a gorgeous French chick (Simone Simon) for good measure. But things don’t go as ol’ Jab expects, so he calls on lawyer Daniel Webster to get him out of his pact with the Devil.

CINEMA | Film Noir

Duel in the Sun. 1946

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COVER STORY

Milo Johnson

The Wild Bunch. Fourth And Broadway. Three Stripes Records. Bristol Words Mark Webster Portrait Janette Beckman

The city of Bristol in southwest England is one of those places that’s very patina, built up over the years, dictated that that it would at some time become one of the great creative hubs.

Three centuries ago, when the heart of the city was still beating around its burgeoning port, it was the fulcrum of trade between the fledgling Americas and Africa. Of course, this involved the wholly erroneous exchange of goods for people but it did slowly affect the way the city’s population developed and grew.

As a result the city was also integral to the revolutionary creation of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Thomas Clarkson, who had initially enlisted the great Wilber Wilberforce to the cause, first collated information about the evil trade at the Seven Stars pub in Redcliffe, which still exists in the city.

The St Pauls area, northeast of Bristol city centre, is where many of the 108

slave merchants originally lived but the area changed dramatically across the generations, and in the 1950s it became home to the newly arrived Jamaicans.

Within 10 years it was once again a catalyst for change as a dispute with the local bus company led to the introduction of the Race Relations Act (1968). And like similar communities across the country, it has subsequently seen the good and the bad living handin-glove – from the riots of the 1980s to its own highly popular annual carnival, which attracts 40,000 people.

That volatile range of extremes was the breeding ground that gave birth to one of popular music’s most important music scenes: a broad church of styles collectively known as the Bristol Sound or trip hop, from which groups and artists such as Massive Attack, Smith & Mighty, Tricky and Nellee Hooper (who went

on to produce the likes of Madonna and U2) emerged. And right there at the start was The Wild Bunch.

Those who were there when these local lads emerged with their sound system and blew all comers away will remember, in particular, the sheer skills and raw magnetism of DJ Mil’o.

Milo Johnson “didn’t come from the worst part of Bristol”, he tells me on a recent trip back to the UK from his now native New York City “but it certainly wasn’t the nicest place either”.

It was however, clearly ripe with latent musical talent not to mention quite the combined record collection.

But not necessarily, at least in the case of this fledgling DJ collective, coldblooded business acumen. Johnson explains, “The whole Wild Bunch thing was never a plan. We were friends and we used to just get together at home and bring our record collections >

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Nellee is My Selecta. Wild Bunch at St Pauls Carnival, Bristol 1985 Beezer Photos beezerphotos.com

with us. We never thought, ‘If we do this right and we get good at this, we could be a sound system.’

“But what certainly was important is that we all had our own tastes in music and that created the unique mix to our sound. I was into some of the new wave stuff, some disco. Gee (Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall) had a massive reggae collection. That really was very important to how we started to develop.”

Even though they were clearly all honing the skills that would ultimately demand public attention it still took them a while to become performers.

“Again, we didn’t decide it was time to move on to playing to a crowd. It just got too busy in our homes,” laughs Johnson, whose gentle tones are lightly splashed with both his Bristolian roots and uptown home in New York.

“People wanted to come and hear us and what we were doing so we just 110

had to keep finding bigger and bigger spaces to play our records. Before we

‘THE WILD BUNCH WAS NEVER A PLAN. WE USED TO JUST GET TOGETHER AT HOME AND BRING OUR RECORDS’ really realised we were doing it, we were actually playing gigs.” Once up there on stage, there was no stopping a team

whose inventive eclectic tastes and striking appearance started to draw attention from well beyond Bristol and the big stage of the St Pauls Carnival.

As the 1980s progressed the record business couldn’t resist paying interest to The Wild Bunch and fellow performers also wanted a little of what they were serving up. Which led to the first seismic shift in Johnson’s life. “I got a call from Neneh Cherry,” he remembers, “and she said to me, ‘I’m going out to Japan on Thursday and I want you to come along’. Well I hadn’t even really been out of the country but how could I not? Once I had got a passport sorted out that is!”

Johnson fell head first into what was happening in Japan and not only started friendships and working relationships with people that last to this day, it also provided him an

COVER STORY | Milo Johnson

New York 1988

Milo, Daddy G and Tricky, Moon Club, Bristol 1988. John Dunn Tokyo 1988

extended family through his wife who he met there. “I got what was going on there, and they got me,” he says, and as a result it made the next big move in his life a logical, seamless one.

By now Johnson had moved to London with Hooper to continue The Wild Bunch experience, while the others went on to form Massive Attack. It resulted in a short-lived but critically successful time recording and remixing for the Fourth And Broadway label. But in 1989 Hooper was now working with Soul ll Soul, with whom Johnson had also DJed at the infamous Covent Garden Africa Centre nights. He decided it was time to start afresh in the city of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

“I know those movies don’t paint the greatest picture of New York but they always made me just want to be part of it. And it was like that at

the beginning. Now though, well, my kids are at schools that mix the richest and the poorest in the city.

“And at the time, it was the perfect move for me because it was the only place where I could do my own thing.

It meant I could record there, press up my own records, get them out there where they needed to be.

“A couple of years later, that was happening all over, but at the time it was my best chance to do it.”

Johnson’s Japanese connection became even stronger at this time as his relationship back in Japan meant he “was sending clothes and records out there” to sate an apparently unquenchable thirst for hip hop culture.

It also enabled him to set up a studio at home: “My little world. My kids would get glimpses of vinyl all over the floor and wonder what was happening in there.”

His skills as a DJ have always been in demand, but he tends not to play in New York, but “I do get out there – see what’s being played, see who’s doing what,” Johnson says.

In 2002 this manifested itself in a compilation album The Story Of A Sound System, mixed by DJ Mil’o, and featuring early hip hop by the likes of Spoonie Gee and T La Rock, soul and disco including tunes by Teena Marie and Evelyn “Champagne” King and even some early house courtesy of Mr Fingers.

For Johnson, though, it is not about looking back. “Those things, those times were great but they don’t define me as a person now. I’m a family man, I have learned to become self-sufficient with the technology that’s available.

“I’m doing my own thing.” Which clearly is, as ever was. dj-milo.net 111

Jack, founding member of Ray Petri’s Buffalo collective, wears shirt by Brutus Trimfit; hat by Stetson.

STYLE

Jake wears suit by Pokit; shirt by Lee 101. Thomas wears suit by Pokit; shirt by Brooks Brothers; tie by Takeo Kikuchi; hat by Stetson. Josh wears suit by Pokit; shirt by Monitaly; chain by ……. Research. Noah wears suit by Pokit; shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; tie by Christopher Nemeth; hat by Borsalino.

The Negrit Brothers Photographs Roger Charity Styling Barry Kamen Photographic Assistant Clementine Charity Styling Assistant Gabriele Yiaxis Buffalo Soldiers Jack, Jake, Josh, Noah and Thomas Negrit

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Jake wears jacket and jeans by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; T-shirt by Hanes; hat by Herbert Johnson; belt by Nivaldo de Lima.

Josh wears suit jacket by Pokit; Czech military T-shirt, stylist’s own; hat by Borsalino; accessories, stylist’s own.

Noah wears jacket and jeans

by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; shirt by Brutus Trimfit; boots

by Dr Martens; belt; tie and sunglasses, stylist’s own.

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Thomas wears jacket by Lee 101; jeans by Lee Archives; hat and gloves, stylist’s own.

STYLE | The Negrit Brothers

Jake wears shirt, stylist’s own; jeans by Lee Archives; T-shirt by Hanes; boots and necklace, stylist’s own.

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STYLE | The Negrit Brothers

Noah wears shirt by Brutus Trimfit; jeans by Lee Archives; boots by Red Wing Shoes; vintage sunglasses by Ray-Ban, stylist’s own; belt and braces, stylist’s own. Thomas wears shirt by Brutus Greatfit; jeans

by Lee 101; T-shirt by Hanes; shoes and hat, stylist’s own. Josh wears shirt by Brutus Greatfit; cut off shorts by Levi’s, stylist’s own; T-shirt by Hanes; sunglasses by Odd Future; shoes, stylist’s own. Jake wears shirt by Brutus Greatfit; shorts by Spacebug; T-shirt by Hanes; shoes

by Dr Martens; hat by Norse Projects; socks by Budd.

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Noah wears suit by Pokit; shirt by Brutus Trimfit; shoes by Bally; hat and jewellery, stylist’s own.

STYLE

Rob wears jacket and shirt by Canali; watch from The Vintage Showroom; pocket square, stylist’s own.

Night and the City Photographs Cameron McNee Styling Richard Simpson Photographic Assistant Harry Sleightholme Grooming Carol Hart Starring Rob Knighton at The Eye Casting and Annette Kellow annettebettekellow.co.uk

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Rob wears coat by Etro; scarf by Tootal; shoes by Grenson; hat by Lock & Co.

STYLE | Night and the City

Annette wears dress by Vivienne Westwood Red Label. Rob wears suit and tie by Brooks Brothers; cardigan by Canali; shirt by Paul Smith.

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Rob wears suit and shirt by Mark Powell; tie by Paul Smith; shoes by Grenson; cufflinks from The Vintage Showroom.

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Rob wears coat by Mark Powell; suit by Richard Anderson; shirt

by Paul Smith; tie by Drake’s.

Rob wears suit by Mark Powell; shirt by Paul Smith; scarf

by Farrell; hat by Lock & Co. Annette wears dress by Issa, from my-wardrobe; fascinator by Lock & Co.

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Rob wears coat by Mark Powell; suit by Richard Anderson; scarf

by Tootal; hat by Lock & Co.

STYLE | Night and the City

Rob wears suit by Mark Powell; shirt by Paul Smith; scarf by Farrell; hat by Lock & Co.

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HISTORY

Andrew Loog Oldham

The Rolling Stones. Mary Quant. Immediate Records. Bitter Sweet Symphony Words Paolo Hewitt Portrait Betina La Plante

He has been a pop manager, a record producer, a label owner and a hustler of the finest order. He has been inspired, brave, brilliant and foolish. He has spent years drugged out of his mind and still managed to wear some of the best clothes. Today he is sober, a fine writer and a radio DJ on Underground Garage in North America.

He is the man who success came to and held his hand at an early age. Andrew Loog Oldham is still trying to work out if that was a curse or a blessing.

His CV is ridiculous. At 16 Oldham was working with Mary Quant. At 18 128

he was PR to The Beatles. By 19 he was the manager of the Rolling Stones. And at 21 years old he was running his own record company, Immediate Records.

At the end of the 1960s he was taking too many drugs and in debt. By the 1980s, he had sorted himself out. At the start of this century he wrote two fine memoirs, Stoned in 2001 and 2Stoned in 2003, but it is with his latest work, Stone Free, published at the end of last year, that Oldham has hit the jackpot.

The book is a wonderful chronicle of hustlers and music industry characters whose collected stories give

us nothing less than an incredible history of British record companies. You only have to read the chapter concerning the signing of the band The Babys to realise the foolish grandeur that has driven the music business.

We have the writer W Somerset Maugham to thank for its genesis.

“I had picked up a copy of Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up, his autobiography and decided I wanted to do just that, to weave together portraits of hustlers and pimpresarios that I have known, admired, loved and sometimes loathed,” says Oldham, as he chats to me from his home in Bogotà. >

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Gered Mankowitz

“That book was really inspirational.

Maugham irons his words flatter than Graham Greene and I never met a cliché I didn’t embrace. I wanted to write about the change in music since I’d written Stoned. Not just the business but the players and I started to define that change by writing about what I grew up on.”

Oldham is supremely qualified to tell this story. He entered the 1960s, with two aims – to change stuffy Britain and make loads of money doing so. He succeeded. Brilliantly.

As a boy, Oldham saw the 1957 American film noir Sweet Smell Of Success and instinctively took to its 130

depiction of wise cracking men whose lives relied on their wits; men who were always looking for that one hustle to take them to the end of the rainbow. It became Oldham’s inspiration. So did Eric Morris, boyfriend at the time of Oldham’s mother Cecilia. His father was killed in the second world war.

“We lived in a basement on Belsize Park Gardens in northwest London,” Oldham recalls. “I was playing in the front garden and suddenly this big geezer was on the pavement.

Handmade suit and shoes, homburg hat, silk shirt and tie, serpent pinkie ring with rubies for eyes, and a paperthin gold watch. It was Eric Morris

and he looked so comfortable that my life changed that day. I wanted in.”

Oldham’s hustle started early. He left Quant’s not long after starting and made his way to America and told Vogue he was responsible for most of Quant’s designs. On his return to the UK he saw The Beatles performing; Oldham knew a chance when it presented itself and he made a beeline to manager Brian Epstein and persuaded him to take him on as the band’s PR. Then came the night he first saw the Rolling Stones perform in 1963.

Again Oldham saw a chance. He hustled into the camp, became the

HISTORY | Andrew Loog Oldham band’s manager, pushed pianist Ian Stewart to the side because he looked too old, persuaded Lennon and McCartney to give them a hit song, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, and then famously locked Jagger and Richards in a room and told them to start writing their own songs. Why? Because that was the way the business was going. More importantly, that was where the money was.

They emerged with a song called ‘As Tears Go By’. Oldham negotiated a deal with Decca Records and the band leased their songs to the company.

Everyone gasped. It was a first. But it wasn’t really. He stole the idea from his all time hero, producer Phil Spector who had made the same move with his Philles record label some years earlier.

Oldham was sharp, fast, and had the measure of the pop business. That is why his most brilliant idea was to turn the Stones into the anti-Beatles. Other bands copied the Fab Four hoping for the magic of their phenomenal success to rub off. Oldham mocked their temerity.

While The Beatles were clean shaven, the Stones were unkempt. Where The Beatles innocently sang to girls about holding their hand, Jagger lasciviously proclaimed himself a “little red rooster”.

Oldham then unleashed one of pop’s greatest headlines and catapulted the band into profitable notoriety. The words he gave the papers ran, “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” Perfect. The band were now public enemy number one.

Again, the line was stolen. “I heard a journalist from the Melody Maker talking about it in the pub,” Oldham reveals, “I nicked the best bit. I remember walking across Covent Garden after lunch on a windy day thinking, ‘God, I cannot wait to get back to my office and put this to use.’ I’m not sure about how much we actually create the moment. The key is recognising it.”

Oldham saw that his presence could only deepen the band’s impact. And he looked the part. Great jackets, good suits, imposing sunglasses.

In 1967 he fucked up. Jagger and Richards were busted for drugs at Richards’ house in Sussex. Convinced he was next, Oldham boarded the first plane to New York. The band never

forgave him for running. He writes very movingly about this in Stone Free.

Fittingly, he says, it’s his favourite chapter.

Conversely, the chapter he found the hardest to write was about his label Immediate Records. Oldham set it up in 1965, one of Britain’s first independent record labels. It was home to the Small Faces and Chris Farlowe among others, and it took Oldham years to finally give his side of the story in 2012.

“I was nowhere near being able to write about it in 2Stoned,” he reveals. “It is still a sore subject because so many aspects of it are not resolved. I consider it a black marker. There is so much credit given to me for being the first independent. Nobody is ever first. In fact, I find the myth built up around the

THE WORDS HE GAVE THE PAPERS RAN, ‘WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A ROLLING STONE?’ Small Faces to be ludicrous. They caught the spliff of the moment, and never developed it. Frontman Steve Marriott was so correct in trying to get away from the low end of the market when he dreamt up rock band Humble Pie. “I was at Chris Stamp’s funeral recently [Stamp co-managed The Who] and Roger Daltrey said that he believed that music could still change the world.

The Small Faces and most of the acts on Immediate thought no such thing.

They lived in their own little corner shop world – they did not expand their universe. The Who did and made the world a better place.”

In the 1960s Oldham cut an album of Rolling Stones covers using an orchestra he named after himself.

The Verve famously sampled a part of that album for their huge hit ‘Bitter

Sweet Symphony’. Oldham has now cut a second volume.

“The fusion guitarist Gary Lucas stopped off to see me in Colombia after some gigs in Brazil,” Oldham explains.

“I’ve known Gary since I lived in Connecticut. He has made a remarkable transition from being an A&R man at CBS radio network in the 1980s to sitting down and embracing the guitar, doing some wonderful work with Jeff Buckley and becoming unique. We actually started thinking of doing a Gene Pitney songbook, but you’ve got to start somewhere. We drifted into the Jagger and Richards songs and cut a few basic tracks here in Bogotà. The whole thing grew. Old friends came on board.

“Singer Vashti Bunyan did a vocal of a track we’d cut of ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals did ‘I Am Waiting’.

Christine Ohlman from the Saturday Night Live Band did a killer version of ‘You’ve Got The Silver’. A great new singer from Vancouver, Ché Dorval Aimee, did ‘Under My Thumb’ and ‘As Tears Go By’, Johnny Marr dropped in on the latter. Gary Lucas does ‘Play With Fire’ and ‘Lady Jane’. Voila, I had the Rolling Stones Songbook Volume Two.” Which means that after all these years hustling in a business which crushed him as much as he changed it, and made him a beacon of inspiration for the likes of Alan McGee, music still lies dead centre in his heart.

“I enjoyed music more when we had to fight for it,” he tells me. ‘Now that it is all around, like love, to paraphrase either The Troggs or the theme from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, it has been diluted. I have certainly seen music change people’s lives radically… at the Monterey Pop Festival, for example.

When my son was born I made a cassette of Motown hits and it played softly under his pillow the first five months of his life while he breastfed, pissed, shat, slept and got ready for his world. When he was older, I remember him asking if I had heard the new 2Pac album he had been playing.

I said, ‘Yes’. He grabbed my arm and said, ‘No, I mean did you really hear it?’

So the answer is always, ‘Yes.’” everyonemustgetstoned.net 131

STYLE

Sam wears sweatshirt by Universal Works; trousers by Haik. Dan wears sweatshirt by Medwinds; trousers by Uniqlo; shoes by Original Penguin; socks by Smart Turnout.

Passed the Eyot Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Emma Freemantle Styling Assistant Bunmi Rowers Dan Hickling and Sam Redmond Location Thames Rowing Club, London www.thamesrc.co.uk

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Dan wears suit jacket by Universal Works; shirt and scarf by Polo Ralph Lauren; hat by Lock & Co. Sam wears blazer by Hackett; shirt from The Vintage Showroom; tie and scarf by Polo Ralph Lauren; hat by Lock & Co.

Sam wears sweater by Smart Turnout; hat by Lock & Co.

STYLE | Passed the Eyot

Dan wears underwear from The Vintage Showroom; headscarf by Worn With Love. Sam wears underwear from The Vintage Showroom; headscarf by Worn With Love.

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Dan wears top by Breuer & Dawson; trousers by Thames Rowing Club; socks by Smart Turnout; hat by Worn With Love. Sam wears top by Hackett; long johns by Icebreaker; neckwarmer by Worn With Love; Thames Rowing Club socks by Smart Turnout.

STYLE | Passed the Eyot

Dan wears sweater by Private White, VC.

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Sam wears sweater by Private White, VC; top

by Hackett; long johns

by Icebreaker.

STYLE | Passed the Eyot

Sam wears top by Universal Showroom; trousers by A Child of the Jago; hat from The Vintage Showroom; shoes by Toms; socks by Uniqlo. Dan wears T-shirt by Henri Lloyd; trousers by A Child of The Jago; underwear from The Vintage Showroom;Â headscarf by Worn With love; shoes by F-Troupe; socks by Smart Turnout.

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BULLETIN

Hancock Vulcanised Articles Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Words Marcus Agerman Ross Sounds So Good Scooter Club Georgia Alice, Andrew Almond, Simon Aukland, Lesley Cooper, Anja Diskin, Tim Field, Bobby Harrison, Bradley Hotson, Niki Kingsley, Amy Ireland and Tom Shaw

Hancock Vulcanised Articles, named after Thomas Hancock, the founder of the British rubber industry, is a new brand specialising in waterproof garments for modern ladies and gentlemen. Established last

year by Daniel Dunko and Gary Bott, who both previously worked at Mackintosh, Hancock’s factory is based in Cumbernauld, Scotland. Here, they employ expert coat-makers who work with various materials such as flannels,

cashmeres, silks and cottons in a wide spectrum of colours using traditional Victorian processes to created vulcanised rubberised garments. hancockva.com 141

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GALLERY

London Jazz Festival Photographs Ross Trevail Words Chris May

Born out of the Camden Festival in the 1970s, the London Jazz Festival as it became known, is now in its 17th year. And it’s no surprise that it continues to endure and grow.

In an age where all music is knowable in an instant, live jazz still has the power to surprise

an audience. This is primarily down to artists such as Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck and, of course not forgetting, Miles Davis who, in the lates 1950s, moved away from the rehearsed, tight playing of the Bebop style.

Focused around a soloist, whole sets can be improvised in the

moment, a unique experience never to be repeated. It is this approach that has led to audiences and musicians alike clamouring to the London Jazz Festival, a week of style, surprises and jazz’s ever present cool. londonjazzfestival.org.uk

Mulatu Astatke

Byron Wallen Ishmael Afla Sackey, Charming Transport Band

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GALLERY | London Jazz Festival

Oren Marshall, Charming Transport Band

Lula Mebrahtu

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GALLERY | London Jazz Festival

Wadada Leo Smith

MUSIC

Aaron Neville Doo-wop. New Orleans. Hercules. Allen Toussaint. Keith Richards Words Chris May

“Doo-wop has been rolling around in my head and my heart my entire life,” says singer Aaron Neville the New Orleans funk and soul veteran. “It’s the foundation of all the music I’ve ever made.” But until now, with his new album and Blue Note Records debut, My True Story, Neville had recorded only one disc dedicated to doo-wop – the vocal harmony-group style with minimal instrumentation that alongside jazz, was the soundtrack of urban black America from the late 1940s until the explosion that was Motown in 1960.

The earlier disc, the 1985 EP Orchid In The Storm, was exquisite. So is My True Story, and it is likely to make the bigger splash: it was co-produced

by Keith Richards, who also played guitar on the sessions, and Don Was, Blue Note’s president.

The album is a winning example of Was’s intention to broaden Blue Note’s 148

remit beyond jazz while remaining true to the label’s founding principle of “authenticity”. A commitment to this was at the root of Blue Note founder Alfred Lion’s mission statement when he started the company in 1939.

“Don and I spoke about that,” says Neville, “and I don’t ever do anything that I cannot feel. It’s got to be something that I can feel in my body, in my heart. I was born in 1941 and the music that I grew up listening to was doo-wop. On this album I wanted to respect it but I didn’t want to do it exactly the same way. I wanted to put my…” Neville pauses. Your mojo?

“Yeah, put my ‘-ism’ into it.”

Richards’ involvement came about by happenstance. He and Neville have known each other since the early 1980s, and Neville’s son Ivan plays keyboards in Richards’ X-Pensive

Winos band. But it was Was who suggested Richards as co-producer and one of the guitarists. Was explained to me: “I was working on the Stones’ Voodoo Lounge album back in 1994.

We were staying in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin and my room was right above Keith’s room. His stereo was going 24 hours a day and it was looping doo-wop records. So when Aaron said he wanted to do an album with doo-wop it just seemed natural to suggest it.”

What Was did not mention but Neville adds, is that one of the tracks Richards was looping was the Jive Five’s 1961 hit ‘My True Story’.

Neville picked the songs – a mix of signature and lesser known doo-wop and early rock ’n’ roll material – and with Was and Richards assembled an empathetic band for the sessions including a trio of doo-wop backing >

Stephanie Chernikowski. Premium Archive. 1970

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vocal adepts, Joel Katz, David Johnson and Earl Smith Jr. “It was wonderful, we didn’t want it to end,” says Neville.

“We wanted to do 12 songs and we ended up with 23. We recorded the tracks in about five days. The guys had done their homework, listened to the songs, they knew what I wanted to do and they had a feeling in their head.

If you listen to the record, you can hear the musicians smiling.”

It has not always been so easy for Neville, whose life has been marked by struggle – with prejudice, drug addiction and, most recently, tragedy. He grew up on a housing project. “But if we were poor, we kids didn’t know it,” says Neville. “We always had something to eat and we had clothes on us. There was love in the family. My dad was a merchant seamen, but my mother was there. She’d read us stories and sing to us. She got me singing. I’m glad she did. It took me a while to find my direction in life, and if I didn’t have music I don’t know if I’d still be on the planet.”

Neville started as a backing singer in his older brother Art’s doo-wop group around 1953. “They’d sit out on a park bench at night and do harmonies. They won talent shows and stuff. They used to run me away at first when I tried to sing with them.”

Music did not however immediately set Neville on the right track. When he 150

began recording with New Orleans legend, producer Allen Toussaint, in 1960 he had already spent time in jail and would do so again.

“I was an inquisitive young fellow when I was growing up – I was always trying to find out about things. Like heroin. I was really young when I started on it. I had to get through that. I did six months for auto theft, joyriding in a stolen car in 1958. And

‘IF YOU LISTEN TO THE RECORD, YOU CAN HEAR MUSICIANS SMILING’ another six months in Los Angeles for a burglary in 1963. That was when I was still trying to figure out who I was and where I was going. Heroin is a mind thing as much as a physical thing. It’s like you’re two people: one of you wants to get rid of it and the other don’t. It took me until 1981 to put heroin down.” Neville acquired

the tattoo (depicting a sword, not a cross, he says) on his left cheek at the start of this period aged 16.

During his years on heroin Neville produced a body of great and enduring work as a solo artist and with the Neville Brothers (who included Aaron’s brothers Art, Cyril and Charles and later Aaron’s son Ivan) and family related groups such as Soul Machine and the Wild Tchoupitoulas. He had his first solo hit in 1966 with ‘Tell It Like It Is’, produced by Toussaint for Par-Lo Records, which topped the US R&B charts for four months and made No2 on trade magazine Billboard’s Hot 100. Unfortunately Par-Lo went out of business before Neville collected on the bulk of his royalties. ‘Hercules’ (1973), written by Toussaint, deserved to sell at least as well but its release was undermined by pressing and distribution problems.

Despite the financial setbacks by the early 1970s Neville had become one of New Orleans music’s most revered stylists, crossing over into the rock world thanks in part to being championed by the city’s high-profile counterculture hero Mac Rebennack aka Dr John the Night Tripper.

Once free of heroin Neville broadened his audience through film work, guest projects and collaborations such as his 1989 hit album with country

MUSIC | Aaron Neville

singer Linda Ronstadt, Cry Like A Rainstorm, Howl Like The Wind, which produced the No2 single ‘Don’t Know Much’. In 1996 he appeared singing and playing himself in the Robert De Niro and Wesley Snipes psychological thriller The Fan. In 2006 he reached the apex of mainstream American breakthrough when, with Aretha Franklin and Dr John, he was invited to perform ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at that year’s Super Bowl, American football’s annual championship match.

Career success aside however the mid 2000s were bad years for Neville. In 2004 his wife Joel, who he had married in 1959, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Then, in 2005 Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Nevilles’ New Orleans home.

“I was on the road when it hit,” says Neville. “Ivan got the family out and they took only a few suitcases because they thought, ‘We’ll be back in three days’. I got Joel to meet me in Memphis and we sat there and watched it on television. The storm passed and we thought, ‘We’ll be back there on Monday’. It was then that the water came. And we realised, we’re not going home. It was just so heartbreaking to see those people there, and nobody was coming for them. Like every time something happens, you see the cavalry

coming. But the cavalry didn’t come to New Orleans.”

Does Neville believe, as many people do, that the US’s federal response to Hurricane Katrina was so woefully lacking in urgency because the majority of the people flooded out of their homes in New Orleans were black? “I don’t know about that,” says Neville, “cos white folk suffered, too.

Sarah A Friedman

But… sometimes it does seem like nothing’s changed. That underlying prejudice is still there and as a black man you got to know how to manoeuvre around it. We shouldn’t have to be still doing that. But it’s everywhere. I don’t think some people

will ever see other races as equal. They still got to feel they are better than someone else. It seems like it’s human nature. But we’re all the same. We’re all born, we’re all gonna die.

“Anyway, Joel and I were watching the TV in Memphis and I knew we weren’t going home. So we went to Nashville where my attorney lives. We found a place up there. Joel couldn’t go back to New Orleans in her condition.

So we stayed in Nashville where she could get proper care. She died on 5 January 2007. Five days before our 48th anniversary.

“It was a bad time. But they always say that God doesn’t give you more than you can bear. I got through it somehow. I met Sarah, my wife today, in May 2008. We got involved and she saved me.”

Today, Neville lives in New York’s East Village. Does he think he will ever make his home in New Orleans again? “I don’t think so. Too many memories. I don’t know. I go back there of course. My heart is there, I grew up there, born and raised; New Orleans is in me. It’s a special place. My brother Cyril always said New Orleans was an island that hooked on to the United States. But now, I’m happy here in New York.”

Aaron Neville’s new album My True Story is out now 151

STYLE

Cold Water Surfing Photographs David Goldman Styling Olie Arnold Photographic Assistant Chris Parsons Styling Assistant Otter Jezamin Hatchett Surfers Marcus Chapman, Simon ‘Skelly’ Skelton and James Stentiford

Skelly wears jacket by Finisterre; shirt by Nigel Cabourn; wetsuit by Snugg.

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Marcus wears jacket by Penfield; jeans by Levi’s; windbreaker by Aether Apparel; boots by Red Wing Shoes; rucksack by Henri Lloyd. Surfboard and wetsuit by Quiksilver. Skelly wears jacket by Finisterre; jeans by Levi’s; boots by Camel. Wetsuit by Snugg; surfboard by Gulf Stream.

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STYLE | Cold Water Surfing

Marcus wears jacket by Aether Apparel; jacket, worn underneath,

by Penfield; jeans by Levi’s; boots

by Red Wing Shoes; rucksack by Henri Lloyd. Wetsuit by Quiksilver.

Skelly wears shirt by Nigel Cabourn.

Marcus wears jacket by Penfield; windbreaker by Aether Apparel.

STYLE | Cold Water Surfing

James wears shirt by DC; jeans by Lee; sweatshirt

by Edwin Jeans.

Marcus wears shirt by Nigel Cabourn; jeans by Levi’s; base layer by Howies; hat

by Burberry Prorsum.

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Skelly wears jacket by Levi’s; jeans by Edwin Jeans; boots by Camel. Marcus wears jacket

by Finisterre; jeans by A.P.C.; hoodie by Loft Design By; T-shirt by Base Control.

STYLE | Cold Water Surfing

Skelly wears shirt by RRL Ralph Lauren; jeans by Levi’s; base layer by Patagonia; boots by Camel.

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BULLETIN

Schott Centennial

Photographs Juan Trujillo Andrades Styling Salim Ahmed Kashmirwala Words Marcus Agerman Ross Styling assistant Holly Broome Diners Jordan Bowen and Ashley Reid

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Schott, the brand that has produced some of the most memorable menswear jackets. Begun in 1913 in New York by brothers Irving and Jack Schott, the company started out making raincoats and continued for a few years until until Irving made the first Schott leather jackets – named Perfecto after his favourite cigars.

In the mid 1920s, Schott created the world’s first zippered jacket, followed by its first range of leather motorcycle jackets.

The second world war saw the brand focus on jackets for the US military. The years that followed were a boom time for Schott as the newly “invented” teenagers, who now had their own money, chose to dress in attire that expressed their freedom.

The leather jacket encapsulated this attitude. When Marlon Brando snarled on screen The Wild One in 1954 in a Perfecto 613 One Star leather jacket, Schott’s reputation was sealed. It’s unsurprising that Peter Fonda’s character

in the 1969 movie Easy Rider, wears a Schott jacket; this time a Cafe Racer.

In the 1970s, the American punk movement, adopted the leather jacket as a central component to its sneering nihilism.

In the 1980s, pioneers of the modern day dandy, Ray Petri’s Buffalo collective, chose the Perfecto. Today, as style focuses on natural fabrics and heritage, Schott continues to enjoy popularity. schottnyc.com 161

PROFILE

The Dodge Brothers Skiffle. Memphis. Silent cinema. Sun Studios. Mark Kermode. Hampshire. Chris Barber Words Mark Webster Photographs Jules Balme

You arrive in the town on the Lymington Flyer. It’s a big name for a little train. It shuttles backwards and forwards from Brockenhurst, which is a little more over Southampton way.

You can alight at Town station, which I did, then watch the Flyer disappear off in a lazy arc, passing a clutch of bobbing masts and on to the next stop, Pier.

This is a seaside town right out of central casting. A man will never go short of a fleece top or a pair of sturdy deck shoes in Lymington. Bay-window shopfront after bay-window shopfront screams coastal leisure. It is a place for nicely off people to go messing about on their boats, then return to town and go messing about in a series of welcoming, hearth warmed pubs.

One dark, dank Friday last year, I was walking along the high street away from the station when I passed a fella coming the other way who had been serving in a pub a little earlier.

“So where you going tonight?” he asks amenably. “A pub. The Thomas Tripp.

To see a band,” I reply. “You should go to The Kings Arms. They have live music and the drinks are cheaper,” he says.

I thank him for the inside skinny and carry on walking. I pass The Kings 162

Arms. Some men are thrashing The Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ within an inch of its life. A chalkboard outside informs me that if I happened to be in Lymington the following night, I could see The Jackson 3 there.

This, though, was a one-night stand for me to see a band that grew up at the Thomas Tripp in Lymington but with a sound that was actually born in the southern states of America nudging 80 or 90 years ago.

“We learned what we call the Great American Songbook. Something like 150 songs,” the band’s slap happy double bass man Mark Kermode tells me as we gather together for a chat after the gig. He is indeed that Mark Kermode, TV presenter and film critic, but his leathery mashed up hands pay testimony to the fact that he has been walking the bass line to some classic American music for many years now.

He has quite literally bled for his art.

The band he co-founded with Mike Hammond – Kermode’s friend and a professor of film history at University of Southampton – is called The Dodge Brothers. And they’re a skiffle group.

Skiffle became popularised as a term in the UK in the early 1950s by the

early rock ’n’ roll and Beat musicians. It emerged as a musical form from a segment in the highly influential Chris Barber’s traditional New Orleans jazz band, when his banjo player Lonnie Donegan would play some traditional southern folk music. The sound was a hybrid of country, blues and rockabilly, traditionally played with the most rudimentary of instruments – both bog standard and improvised.

Before The Beatles became pop’s first supergroup, they were a skiffle group called The Quarrymen.

However it is the original unadulterated American sounds that are the only thing of interest to The Dodge Brothers. “We love this old music,”croaks Hammond, his voice crumbling having just given the Tripp pub a big old slice of it. “And we learned it because we loved it, not to change it. Not to write songs.

“And we pride ourselves on bringing a song through that no one has ever heard of. Like that version of ‘Stagger Lee’ that we do. Everyone knows that song, but it is a 1927 version of it that we do.”

Yet they do perform new songs.

Only they don’t, not really. >

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“We write old songs,” says Kermode. “My feeling was having learnt 150 of the old songs, if you can then write one that doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb then you are on the right track.

“We must have played, like, 10 gigs before we admitted it and first cracked the gag one night, ‘We don’t play any songs after 1951. We wrote this in 1949.’”

The other two Dodges came along a little while after Kermode and Hammond started as a duo. They are multi-guitarist Aly Hirji (a sound engineer who works with Kermode) and Hammond’s son Alex, who gave up a conventional drum kit for a washboard (pure skiffle), a snare and, on one early recording with the Dodges that encouraged Kermode and Hammond to double up the band of Brothers, “a pocketful of change – £7.38 I think it was, mainly in silver.

None of it was mine”.

That was on their first album The Dodge Brothers recorded in the UK in 2006. For the new album, The Sun Set due out later 164

this year, things took a turn most decidedly not Lymington.

Memphis is the biggest city in the State of Tennessee followed up by its rhinestone brother Nashville, the acknowledged home of country music.

Memphis is no shrinking wallflower either. In the 1960s, the city’s Stax Records label introduced the world to the likes of Otis Redding, Booker T & The MGs, Wilson Pickett and proved to be an enduring antithesis to the slicker Motown sound.

Yet it is unlikely that there would have been a Stax – indeed there may not have been any popular music quite as we now know it – if there hadn’t earlier been Sun Records.

The Sun Studios were opened in 1950 by a local radio station engineer Sam Phillips to record local blues and gospel musicians to sell on to already established labels. By 1952 Sun Records was born and so were the careers of the likes of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis.

‘Rocket 88’, written and sung by Ike Turner, was recorded there in 1951

and is considered by many to be the very first rock ’n’ roll record.

That is the heritage. The history.

And the past that The Dodge Brothers decided was going to be their future.

“Mike and I, with our families, went to Memphis on holiday to do the Blues Trail visiting the places where the music was born,” Kermode explains about the genesis of the project, “and part of that is the Sun Studios tour where there are ‘Xs’ on the floor where Elvis Presley stood and where his guitarist Scottie Moore stood.

“And quite by accident, I was stood on the spot where Presley’s bass man Bill Black had stood. My wife Linda said to me, ‘It’s a sign’.

“So we came back home and I told Aly and he said, ‘Do you think we can record there?’ And I said, ‘Well no, it’s bloody Sun Studios!’”

Luckily though, as Kermode puts it, Hirji’s “never been afraid of those kind of things”, and two weeks later he told the band, “I’ve had a chat with Sun and I’ve done a deal with them.”

And the deal was, as Kermode says, two “terrifying” days – or rather nights

PROFILE | The Dodge Brothers because the studio is as a museum during the day – in which to acclimatise to their hallowed surroundings, orientate themselves with the studio’s instruments (“We only took my washboard,” says Hirji laughing) and leave with a record that would not only do the band but also the Sun heritage proud.

These matters were placed in the hands of chief studio engineer Matt Ross-Spang. A native of Memphis, he describes himself in his Twitter profile as a “purveyor of lost sounds, fried chicken connoisseur, soul man”, while Hammond goes with describing him as looking like “a Confederate veteran” adding, “and like all the young kids working at the studio, they all know their stuff. It warms the heart.”

When the band explained to RossSpang what they wanted from the experience to make the music sound authentic, he told them how they could deliver. “If you want to do it like 1953,” Ross-Spang says, “then you have no cans, you use these old microphones.

Nothing is soundproofed.”

Other tricks he came up with included wrapping amps in blankets and putting a wallet puffed out with receipts on the drum to change its sound. (The Dodge Brothers learned their own tricks too. On day one, they turned around a picture of Bono that was on the wall. The second day, they just took it out of the room.)

Yet as they entered the studios on the first evening, nothing had prepared them for what was about to unfold in the next 48 hours. Kermode recalls another band was leaving having completed a two hour session to record one track. He asked them, “How did it go?” and they said, “We didn’t get it.”

So he said to the others, “Well how long can it take?”

Come nine o’clock the next morning, The Dodge Brothers bass player left with his slapping hand bleeding. End of day one of the two day session, and they were all wondering the same thing – how long?

However come night two and “we’d grown up”, says Kermode. “We were all tired, all in pain, all desperate and the first track we did, ‘Singled Out’, we’d only written that day. But that is the first track on the album, mixed straight

out of the desk, and once that was down, the whole album was one session.”

In two days in Memphis with the bearded wonder Ross-Spang, they had gone from plenty of “squirly” (his word for “not quite there”), to, as Hirji recalls, “that hair and beard sticking up from behind the desk, a thumb going up and him telling us ‘get your asses in here.’” That meant another one was in the bag and The Dodge Brothers would ultimately leave the building with their own piece of Memphis that as Kermode puts it “got into our soul”.

All of which may make the fact that as we carry on chatting over a few beers,

AS THEY ENTERED THE STUDIOS, NOTHING HAD PREPARED THEM FOR THE NEXT 48 HOURS

Hammond is given to wax lyrical about the “digital revolution”. This may seem somewhat at odds with The Dodge Brothers philosophy, but there is a very particular reason for this.

One of the other manifestations of The Dodge Brothers is as orchestra pit accompanists to silent movies, which is possible because of the aforementioned breakthrough in technology. Hammond goes on: “It is the best thing that happened to

silent movies because those that have been lost in time for 60 to 70 years can now be seen by a new audience.

“And when it was rejuvenated, a lot of scores were written but it’s pretty clear that originally they weren’t screened with orchestras but with three or four local musicians who were trying to please the audience.”

With Kermode’s celluloid connection a well established fact and Hammond’s day job, it is perhaps not surprising that the two were drawn to the flickering world of early cinema. But, in fact, it was Neil Shand, the man Hammond calls “the country’s leading silent film pianist – indeed, top in the world”, who made the first approach when he went to see the band play when they were still a duo.

Hammond continues, “Four or five years ago, we were all at a silent movie festival and Neil said to me, ‘I have the perfect film for The Dodge Brothers.’

I was worried because he can play perfectly to a film he’s never seen before. He makes it look effortless.

And that was how it was always originally played too.”

Nevertheless, they couldn’t resist and set about creating a score from their music for what Hammond calls a “brilliant cowboy” from 1921 called White Oak. “We cut our teeth on that,” says Hammond. His son adds, “Yeah, I had one drum, and at one point about 300 gun shots in the film!” but since then it has evolved (from instructions like “ominous in E minor”, recalls Hirji laughing) to the point where the band are now playing as naturally as their esteemed pianist friend.

Kermode says, “Last time we played on Beggars Of Life (1928) [which they plan to tour and have recorded music for a possible DVD release] I don’t think we played anything on the page.

It is very much like those Sun sessions on the second night.”

Or perhaps, just like a great night down at the Tripp with Mike and Mark, Aly and Alex? Just making skiffle.

The Dodge Brothers album The Sun Set will be released later this year dodgebrothers.co.uk 165

HISTORY

Weegee

Naked City. Speed Graphic. Ambulance chasers Words Chris Sullivan

When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes.

But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls. Ted Grant Never has this valuable maxim been truer than in the case of the godfather of reportage photography, Weegee, who was prolific in shooting people on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1930s and 1940s.

His black and white images need no captions, leave little room for explanation and deliver much more than just a story; they have heart. They depict scenes of everyday urban life.

And lest we forget, great photos and art are like good jokes. If you have to explain them, they aren’t that special.

Accordingly, Weegee developed this astonishing style out of necessity.

His early photographs, intended to enable New York immigrants who had little command of the English language to keep abreast of news events, were featured in tabloids such as The Daily News, The New York World Telegram and The New York Post, whose editors demanded sensation in

time for the first edition, before the blood stains were washed off the streets. “If it bleeds, it leads”, was the sneering rallying call of the day’s tabloids. And given the violent times (prohibition fuelling the fires of Mob activity, causing warfare between the Mafia bosses Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano), there was more than enough bloodletting to satisfy both readers and editors.

Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Alfred Stieglitz Indeed, one gets the feeling that the gangster’s body on the floor in Weegee’s 1936 Corpse With Revolver might still be warm, while his battered and bruised Cop Killer of 1941 looks as if he might step out of the frame and kill again. Weegee’s images tell of murder, gangland, fire, horribly mangled car crashes and the joyous underbelly of New York City. Weegee’s images sweat authenticity. They are film noir personified.

I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room. I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the city morgue. Weegee Yet, to achieve his aims, Weegee refused any discipline and swerved and all rules. He had no time for technique or artifice or pretence.

His work was not governed by art. He grew out of an industrial darkroom, not college. His work was not symbolic and neither was it a celebration of his subject. Even though photography was everything to him, it was his vocation, which put food in his mouth. All he desired was to do his thing, make enough cash to be comfortable and garner enough fame and notoriety to facilitate sexual congress with females of an attractive nature.

He achieved these ambitions, together with, once the whiff of tabloid sensationalism had long gone, a reputation as a genius. He was a truly great photographer whose raw compassionate images, such as Easter Sunday In Harlem (1940), eclipse anything that his middle class imitators (Diane Arbus, Robert Frank) might >

Easter Sunday in Harlem 1940

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HISTORY | Weegee

Cop Killer 1941

produce decades later. As with his Eastern European counterpart, Brassai (the contemporaries were born three months and roughly 400 miles apart), one gets the feeling that Weegee was cut from the same cloth as those he photographed: a man from the street, shooting people on the street.

His photos were never patronising or voyeuristic.

When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track. Weegee Weegee wasn’t taking shots looking into the fish tank; he was right in there with the piranhas and the goldfish, 168

fighting for survival and taking his life in his hands. He shot in decidedly dangerous neighbourhoods where few would dare tread. But Weegee was in his element, because that was where he came from.

He was born Usher Fellig on 12 June 1899 in Zlockow, in the former Austrian Province of Galicia, now part of the Ukraine. His devoutly Jewish parents, Bernard and Rachel, owned a grocery store but lost the business several years later. In 1909 his mother and her four sons followed their father to New York. At Ellis Island the officer who handled the young boy’s immigration anglicised his name to Arthur. Subsequently, the family lived in a three-room cold water flat in the then squalid

Lower East Side, and shared a toilet with three other families.

Immigrant life on the Lower East Side was tough back then. Jewish gangsters such as Arnold Rothstein and Waxey Gordon ruled their roost with iron fists, while unemployment, disease and poverty were all the rage.

Survival was especially hard for the Felligs, as papa refused to work on the Sabbath, which, considering he was now selling crockery in a barrow and Saturday was market day, was of no use to his family whatsoever. Under pressure, young Arthur thus found himself on the street aged 12 selling newspapers. He left school at 14 and started washing dishes at the Automat.

He sold candy at burlesque shows. He lived on his wits. His Damascene

Corpse with Revolver 1936 Arrested for Murder 1944

moment came after a tintype smudger (street photographer) took his photo on a donkey. As a result he bought his own tintype kit and a pony and wandered the ghetto taking shots of kids, selling the images to their proud parents. Unfortunately his endeavours came to an end after his wages couldn’t cover the cost of the stables.

Ultimately, the intense religious observance that enveloped the Fellig household (his father became a Rabbi) caused the young man to leave home, aged 18, with not a dime. He slept rough. He stood in queues for food with bums. He stayed in missions.

Eventually he got a job with the Adler Photo studios in Lower Manhattan as a darkroom assistant, but left after two years when both pay rise and promotion failed to materialize.

What I did anybody can do. But I am a perfectionist. When I take a picture… it’s gotta be good. Weegee But the young man’s impatience served him well. In 1921 he obtained a part time position in the darkroom at Wide World Photos (a subsidiary of the New York Times). Seeing the machinations of a major newspaper, he grasped exactly what was needed to get your shots on the front page. In 1924 he started at Acme Newspictures and worked in the

darkroom for $20 a week. He was happy. “The smell of the developing and hypo chemicals was intoxicating,” he explains in his autobiography, Weegee by Weegee (1961). “I was learning photography in the darkroom. When I went out to do my own pictures later I was able to envisage how they would look in the enlarger.”

After two years of being up to his elbows in developer, the time was nigh for him to move up the ladder and take some photos.

Typically, he refused to conform to the company’s rule that photographers wear a white shirt and a tie when covering a story, and was only allowed to leave the office and take pictures after dark, for emergencies, most of which were fires.

Slowly, as his fellow lens men slept, Weegee was getting the upper hand, expanding his horizons by taking smudges of hoodlums, traffic accidents, arrests and murders. Using his trusty 4x6 inch ICA German Trix, he set his aperture at f/16 and speed at 1/200 of a second, stood about 10 feet away from his subjects and became one of the first photographers to employ a flash bulb. Weegee mastered the craft. His sharply contrasting, dramatic graphic images defined and revealed the era.

Photographers deal in things whichare continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. Henri Cartier-Bresson For the next 11 years Weegee, just like Brassai, took photos only at night. He supplemented his meagre income by playing the fiddle in a Third Avenue movie theatre. After eight years his wages had risen slowly to $50 a week.

His forte (and pride and joy) was to be first at the scene of a crime or accident and getting his shots to the wire agencies and syndicated before the competition. He once developed pictures in the driver’s cab of the subway train from Battery to Midtown. On another occasion he was asked to cover a world championship boxing match at the Polo Grounds, so rented an ambulance. “After the first knockout I’d get in the ambulance and hide and a messenger would get the exposed holder to me,” he clarified in his memoirs. “Then with sirens blaring, red lights flashing and cops clearing the way we’d make a mad rush downtown. While the ambulance sped I lay on the floor developing the glass negative. Another scoop for Acme!”

The story goes that an Acme staffer joked that Weegee must have used a > 169

Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.

Robert Frank The man lived and sweated photography.

After losing all his wages in a staff crap game, Weegee moved out of his seedy lodging house into the Acme darkroom, sleeping on a shelf and living off Campbell’s soup, Heinz baked beans and Uneeda biscuits.

He was evicted from the darkroom in 1935 after revealing himself by scooping a plane crash story off the staff ticker tape at 4am.

Sure. I’d like to live regular. Go home to a good-looking wife, a hot dinner, and a husky kid. But I guess I got film in my blood. I love this racket. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous. It’s funny. It’s tough.

It’s heartbreaking. Weegee But give him his due: it was Weegee who was largely responsible for the quantum shift in newspaper reporting.

Until now, newspaper photos had illustrated the text, but after Weegee, the balance changed. The photo was now all, and it was the photographer who determined the parameters of the story. Weegee had pioneered the discipline through sheer necessity. He

f/8 and be there. Weegee Acme should have turned a blind eye. The following year, Weegee went freelance and started making a real name for himself.

He rented a room behind the Manhattan Police Headquarters and wired up a radio so that he could be the first to hear the police and fire brigade signals from the dispatcher. For a while he rode with the cops to the scene but later bought his own 1938 Chevy Coupe, shortwave radio forever on alert. He often arrived at the scene before the rozzers.

WEEGEE WAS NOT A REPORTER, RATHER HE WAS A FABULIST ON THE STREETS WITH A CAMERA

Crime was my oyster. I liked it!

If I had a picture of two handcuffed criminals being booked, I would cut the picture in half and get five bucks for each. Weegee Somehow, he finagled a key to the darkroom of the New York Post.

After he had enough disasters and conflagrations in his pocket, he’d totter off, develop the photographs and do the rounds of the newspaper picture desks, selling his shots of murder and mayhem for $5 a pop.

By 1939 the Daily Mirror and Daily News had no option but to rely on Weegee for all their coverage of any fire, murder or crime that happened after dark. As a result, he made a name for himself and rather wryly demanded to be credited as Weegee the Famous.

was the unrivalled the master of single image storytelling. First on the scene, he would peruse the scenario and often position himself so that, within the frame, a street sign or advertisement might add a sardonic twist. Pity the journalist who supplied comment beneath Weegee’s shot of a dead body under a load of newspapers beneath a cinema that advertises a movie entitled Joy of Living, while his 1944 photograph Wrong Way, picturing a car crashed on to the roof of Grand Central Station above a traffic sign that says One Way, hits the nail on the proverbial. Sometimes he got lucky with his leitmotif: his shot of a burning building with a frankfurter advertisement four stories up proclaiming “Just add boiling water” is a case in point. To achieve this incredible image, he had to pull up

Ouija board to scoop the story. The phonetic nickname stuck.

the goods with expert use of his flashgun and deft dalliance with the extremely volatile flash powder, which he sprinkled on the floor and lit as he pressed the shutter.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. Diane Arbus Weegee’s shots often tell of the chaos of urban life. He avoided taking pictures of fires, instead concentrating on the firemen; not the gangsters but their dead bodies; not the corpses but the shocked spectators (Their First Murder, 1941); and not the car crash but the distraught wife (And The Living Suffer, 1941) whose husband has just died in his delivery truck. “All burning buildings look alike,” said the photographer in a radio interview in 1951. “I took shots of those who were affected by it, like the one of the mother and daughter in grief next to the fire truck. The firemen told me the fire was a roast, which is what they say when someone is still left in the building, and here the mother looks up in hope that her child stuck in the building will survive while her daughter realises the truth. This photo haunted me for the rest of my life. Some editors got it and others didn’t.”

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.

Brigitte Bardot Still, in his first decade as a freelancer he took some of the greatest “killing shots” ever realised. He estimated that he photographed some 5,000 murders. “Sometimes I used Rembrandt side lighting, not letting too much blood show,” he explained in his mythologised memoir. “And I made the stiff look real cosy, as if he were taking a short nap. But murders were easy to shoot because the stiff is on the ground and couldn’t get up and walk away or get temperamental.”

The man himself looked as though he had stepped out of one of the era’s many film noir flicks: battered homburg, greasy scrambled egg tie, big square Speed Graphic camera in >

HISTORY | Weegee

Sammy and Guests 1943

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Heat Spell 1941

hand with the huge flash gun; chewing on a cigar butt, loosely fat in scruffy creased suits that were a size too big, his pockets bulging with spare flash bulbs and film. It’s little wonder he influenced the look of classic movies such as American film noir Double Indemnity (1944).

What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. Karl Lagerfeld A walking, talking caricature, the public lapped Weegee up. He and his photos seemed like missives from another planet. He delivered an alternative reality to the doorsteps of the New York working stiff: an arena that few had experienced and most were very happy to avoid. In 1940 he started working for the ground breaking New York daily newspaper PM, where the picture editor, William McCleery aimed to set a new standard for news photography. Now given carte blanche to set out his own stall, Weegee expanded his oeuvre by embarking on a series of shots that, not based in the crime room, fully expressed his genius. Who might forget his Max The Bagel Man (1940), stepping out of the darkness near to 172

Lost Children 1941

dawn, or the unconvincing transvestite getting out of a cop wagon in The Gay Deceiver (1940), or Heat Spell (1941), a rather tender image of four young children and a kitten sleeping outside on a tenement fire escape during the heat of summer? It’s the humanity of the man that stands out. Whereas Arbus always chose the ugliest shots of her subjects (to her they were like Carnie sideshow freaks), Weegee looked for the best, as any one of them might have been him. Simply, photography doesn’t get much better.

If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

Eve Arnold Even though by now he was distancing himself from blood bullets and burning buildings, in 1941, Weegee the Famous, not one to miss out on milking even his own notoriety, staged his first exhibition “Weegee: Murder is My Business”. He followed up with two group shows at the Museum of Modern Art. Here, the dishevelled smudger unveiled his love and knowledge of another side of the city, which allowed the world a glimpse of exactly where he came from.

He shot regulars at his local bar, such as Shorty, the Bowery Cherub, New Year’s Eve (1943), which sees a three-foot midget in a nappy reaching up to the bar with one hand and drinking beer with the other. Girls Watching a Movie (1943) pictures a gang of young kids, one wide eyed, one asleep and another blowing a bubblegum bubble, seemingly uninterested in the film.

To get the shot, the lens man disguised himself as the cinema’s ice cream man and used infrared film and flash. It’s not hard to see where the likes of Bruce Davidson or Richard Avedon looked for inspiration. John Szarkowski, the Museum of Modern Art’s perceptive photography curator, asserts that Weegee was “not a reporter but a fabulist”.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

Joan Miró Ultimately it was the overwhelming success of his first photography book, Naked City (1945), that inspired Weegee to give up the blood and guts tabloid milieu. Suddenly, he was groovy. Vogue, Life and Seventeen commissioned the scruffy cigarchomping snapper, and he began to

HISTORY | Weegee

Summer On The Lower East Side 1937

make what he described as “lush money”. In short, Weegee was now a “face”, perhaps the most recognised news photographer in the US. His photos pre-empted the myriad monotone noir films that packed out the movie houses and as such, sold the rights of Naked City to a Hollywood studio. Consequently, he involved himself in filmmaking and, in 1948, made the 20-minute short New York, followed by another seven movies.

He left his beloved Manhattan and plotted up in Hollywood. He took to acting, playing a photographer in Every Girl Should Be Married (1948); a boxing timekeeper in Robert Wise’s landmark The Set Up (1949); and a bumin Journey Into Light (1951). But

even though Weegee longed to be a part of the Hollywood Dream, he just didn’t fit in. He took some of the greatest ever shots of Marilyn Monroe (she loved the eccentric smudger), but his other more gimmicky shots of her distorted face exhibit nothing of the empathy that so distinguished the likes of The Vegetable Peddler (1944), or Summer, Lower East Side (1937), both of which ache with empathy. He returned to New York in 1952 having described LA as the “land of the zombies”.

In 1957, after developing diabetes, he moved in with Wilma Wilcox, a Quaker social worker whom he had known since the 1940s, and who cared for him and his work. He

used what money he’d accrued to travel through Europe. He photographed for London’s Daily Mirror and The Times, and worked as special effects consultant for his devoted fan Stanley Kubrick in 1964’s Dr Strangelove.

On Christmas Day 1968 he died of a brain tumour in New York. He left 16,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives that were bequeathed to the International Center of Photography New York by Wilcox, his longtime companion.

Murder is My Business and Weegee’s Naked City will be published later this year steidlville.com 173

FOLIO

Kareem. Member of the Fallen Kings Crew, Sacramento, California. UK B-Boy Championships World Finals Solo B-Boy Champion, 2012

UK B-Boy Championships World Finals

B-boys grew out of the nascent hip hop scene in late 1970s New York and refers to the dancers who invented new and exciting ways to dance to the music. B-boying grew rapidly because it was immediately accessible; it didn’t require special clothing, equipment or places to perform it. Likewise, the opportunity to exercise flair and personality within the context of B-boy “battles” was regarded as a healthy outlet for youthful energy. Among the first professional B-boy crews was the Rock Steady Crew. Today, founding member Crazy Legs is heavily involved in promoting B-boy culture around the world. The UK B-Boy Championships were started in the mid 1990s by DJ Hooch. Organised with Oshun Santiaga from Hot 110 Entertainment, last year’s competition was hosted by Crazy Legs. Photographer Paul Vickery was given exclusive access to the event for Jocks&Nerds. bboychampionships.com hot110ent.com Photographs Paul Vickery

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Morris. Member of the Fallen Kings Crew, Sacramento, California. UK B-Boy Championships World Finals Solo B-Boy Champion, 2009 and 2011

Audience at UK B-Boy Championships World Finals 2012, Brixton, London

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FOLIO | B-Boy

D-LO ENT

Tyrone Van Der Meer.

Founder of Notorious IBE thenotoriousibe.com

Crazy Legs. Founding member of the Rock Steady Crew and host of the UK B-Boy Championships World Finals crazylegsworkshop.com

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David ‘Rockin Dave’ Saunders and Mo Coppoletta

Family Business

Ten years old this year, The Family Business Tattoo Parlour on London’s Exmouth Market is a work of art in itself. A fabulously lavish Aladdin’s Cave combining stylish decor with abundant examples of their artist’s work, it was established by Italian Mo Coppoletta, who has wholeheartedly adopted the culture of his new hometown.

Over the years, the shop has developed a reputation on an international level, while the tattooists have often travelled from far and wide in order to call The Family Business home.

Their talents are not simply skin deep. A handsome book has been published displaying some of their finest work, and like other artists who work there, Coppoletta has branched out, creating a diverse collection of designs including a label for a Ralph Lauren drinks range and patterns for a new set of textiles for Liberty’s forthcoming range. thefamilybusinesstattoo.com mocoppoletta.com Photographs Gavin Watson Words Mark Webster

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FOLIO | Family Business

Lekan Animashaun aka Baba Ani. Keyboards and Musical Director

Abidemi Adekunle. Baritone Saxophone

Okon Iyamba. Shekere

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80

Brian Eno says they make “the biggest, wildest, livest music on the planet”. For proof, you have only to look at the faces of Seun Anikulapo Kuti & Egypt 80, photographed here during a soundcheck before a recent London performance, having flown in from Japan just seven hours earlier.

Egypt 80 was formed by Afrobeat originator Fela Kuti in 1979, and led by him until his death in 1997. Today, the band is led, magnificently, by Fela’s son Seun.

Nigerian Yoruba culture, out of which Afrobeat grew, cherishes age and experience, and the oldest Egypt 80 member, bandleader and keyboards player Lekan Animashaun is 78 years. Animashaun, also known by the honorific Baba Ani, joined Fela’s Koola Lobitos in 1965 and remained with him through all his subsequent bands – Nigeria 70, Africa 70, Afrika 70 and Egypt 80 – and shared with Fela decades of brutal police and army repression in Nigeria.

At 30, Seun is among the younger members of the line-up.

He embraces his father’s music and his revolutionary politics, but gives both of them his own twist. “When I write music,” says Seun, “it’s from the perspective of a 30-year-old man living in 2013.” Tradition with innovation. A blinder.

Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Words Chris May Photographic Assistant James Moriarty

FOLIO | Seun Kuti & Egypt 80

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David Obanyedo. Lead Guitar

Ajayi Adebiyi. Drums

Wale Toriola. Percussion

Kola Onasanya. Percussion

FOLIO | Seun Kuti & Egypt 80

Olugbade Okunade. Trumpet

Oyinade Adeniran. Tenor Saxophone

Kunle Justice. Bass Guitar

Alade Oluwagbemiga. Rhythm Guitar

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FOLIO | NY Creatives

Cey Adams, artist

cargocollective.com/ceyadams

Greg Lamarche, artist greglamarche.com

Robert Glasper, jazz pianist robertglasper.com

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Ian Wright, artist mrianwright.co.uk

Felix Hernandez, DJ

classicsoul.com

Davi, musician bydavi.com

NY Creatives

Before moving to New York in the early 1980s, just in time to document the developing hip hop and graffiti scene, photographer Janette Beckman had already carved a successful career shooting for music and style magazines in the UK, including Melody Maker and The Face. From the off, Beckman was interested in the “personality� of music, focusing as much on the fans as the stars. Before turning professional, she captured the energy and styles of the Notting Hill Carnival in the mid 1970s, and it is this interest in the role creativity plays in the world at large at that influences her work now. Recently, she has been documenting the wealth of creative talent that has been bubbling under for the past few years in New York, which is being hailed with an enthusiasm rarely seen since Beckham arrived in the Big Apple all those years ago. janettebeckman.com Photographs Janette Beckman

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SPOTLIGHT

Hammond B3 Words Mark Webster Portrait Agnes Lloyd-Platt

You may well argue that this unwieldy lump of brown furniture is not exactly much in the looks department. This may be true. But looks aren’t everything; especially not when its got the kind of character, history and voice that this most unlikely of popular music icons has become across the decades.

The Hammond B3 organ was invented by mechanical engineer Laurens Hammond in Chicago in 1934, with the idea that he could create a cheaper, more compact organ for both churches and homes given to evoking the Christian spirit in their front rooms. His prototype was built from a dismembered secondhand piano

and road tested by a treasurer at his company, who also happened to be the organist at his local church.

However, it was when the Hammond was coupled with another recent invention, the Leslie speaker – clearly the ying to the B3’s yang, although Hammond himself wasn’t initially sure about the powerful new sound box – that the organ took on a whole new lease of life; one that has lasted all the way into contemporary music.

Wild Bill Davis – a one time member of Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five – is cited as being the first to hear the instrument’s crossover potential but it was certainly keyboard player Jimmy

Smith who made it happen. Smith had been working as a piano player in various Philadelphia R&B bands in the mid 1950s when he decided to lock himself away to master the Hammond before emerging as its jazz guru. He was heard plying his new trade in Philly

by Blue Note Records co-founder Alfred Lion, which resulted in a record deal; more than 40 sessions for the label from the late 1950s to the early 1960s and the album The Incredible Jimmy Smith.

It is undoubtedly the work of Smith that captured the imaginations of the British Beat combos of the 1960s, with Steve Winwood, Georgie Fame and Alan Price of The Animals >

Greg Boraman, keyboard player, The Fantastics

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SPOTLIGHT | Hammond B3 Jack McDuff

Jimmy Smith

Booker T

Jon Lord

among those who introduced the sound of the Hammond into pop music of the time. Indeed, over in Memphis around the same time, Stax Records’ houseband leader Booker T Jones was also pioneering it; ‘Green Onions’ (1962) becoming a Hammond classic.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the Hammond also pervade through the developing progressive rock scene through the likes of Greg Emerson of ELP and the late Jon Lord from Deep Purple – all caught up in the music of Smith as well as fellow Hammond men such as Jimmy McGriff and Brother Jack McDuff. While in Jamaica, the brilliant Jackie Mittoo was also picking up these influences and passing it on through his Hammond work at Studio One 188

with the groundbreaking Skatalites.

Here in the UK, we are blessed with a couple of serious exponents of the instrument. Multi-instrumentalist Paul

Moran works frequently as a big band musical director, and is currently busting out the B3 with Van Morrison’s band, while Acid Jazz alumni, now

Freestyle recording artist with his band The Fantastics, Greg Boraman is positively evangelical about his favourite instrument. “I was familiar with the sound through its use in popular music in the 1960s and 1970s but hearing McGriff ’s secular gospel stomper I’ve Got A Woman blew my mind inside out… and it still does,” And for an obsolete instrument it’s incredibly varied in its sound – it can purr; it can roar. It’s actually quite human.” They may not make the Hammond B3 – quite literally – like they used to, but this great brute of a machine is still out there with something to say. hammondorganco.com

R E S T R I C T E D

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SINCE 1963

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ICON

Bass Weejuns Words Chris Sullivan Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Vintage clothes dealer Scott Simpson

The Bass Weejun has never put a foot wrong. A design that, like Florsheim Imperial shoes, Redwing Engineer boots and 501 XX jeans, has never changed because it doesn’t have to.

Yet, said loafer, once considered as American as a fundamental lack of irony, was actually based on a shoe discovered in Norway. The footwear went overground to the UK in the early 1930s when a canny Brit imported a few examples, which were adopted by camp theatrical types such as actors Jack Buchanan and Noël Coward, slipping nicely into the new softly tailored English look.

Before one’s wrist might limp they were selling faster than johnnies in a dockside knocking shop.

Consequently, visiting Yanks took the slippers back to the US and, without a smidgen of conscience, copied them. One such plagiarist was GH Bass who registered the name Weejun and set about producing the moccasins in 1936. Following a shoot in Esquire magazine the likes of James Stewart, Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby made them their own and the groundbreaking casual shoes became an essential part of the classic American portmanteau for the pre-second world war middle classes.

But it was only after that the item’s popularity went truly ballistic. Hepcats and Beatniks loved them – chinos, 501 jeans, a Sloppy Joe top and Weejuns sans sock. The shoes spoke of unlaced liberation and suggested all things bohemian, such as Gene Kelly in An American In Paris (1951) and Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.

On the other hand, Weejuns were also embraced by staid, golfing right wing elders who, having taken Stewart and Crosby as their style icons, wore 190

them with cardigans, button-downs and slacks. Curiously, it was these rather stolid old gits who furthered the Weejun’s standing as a Hep shoe and not that of the Beatniks, as every dullard Ivy League student wanted to look like their dad. It was then that loafers along with chinos, anything from Brooks Brothers, wingtips and corduroy became as big a sign of conformity as one might encounter.

Ipso facto, when a gang of Hepcat reefer smoking, serious jazz musicians, such as Miles Davis, Jimmy Heath, Milt Jackson and Art Pepper wanted a look that distanced themselves from the Uncle Tom demeanour of the previous generation of black musicians they chose the Ivy League look. By 1955 the look had become the cool school of jazz uniform and groovy white actors such as Paul Newman and Steve McQueen checked out the style in New York jazz clubs and assumed the position.

Over the pond, London Modernists copied the look but it wasn’t until 1963, when McQueen wore a pure Ivy look on the cover of Life magazine, that the style really caught on. Then, after John Simons opened The Ivy Shop in Richmond, Surrey in 1964, Bass Weejuns hit the UK streets.

Soon all manner of British working class tough guys were stepping out dressed like aged American senators. In 1967 Simons opened the Squire shop in Brewer Street, Soho, selling undiluted Ivy. “We sold heavy wingtips plain cap brogues, Bass Weejuns, raincoats, cardigans, crew neck jumpers and Levi’s and 501s, all imported from the US,” explains Simons, “to former mods who weren’t into the hippy stuff.”

“Unfortunately we were branded skinheads,” says Dexy’s Midnight

Runners’ singer Kevin Rowland who dressed as such in 1967. “This was because some guys used to crop their hair, but it wasn’t a skinhead thing like the media reported – it was Ivy. They wanted to look conservative and Middle American, like an astronaut or a serviceman. The style was so subversive because it was conservative compared to the hippy fashion that was around at the time. The hair was like a short back and sides, we wore thick soled brogues or Bass Weejuns and the Harrington was the jacket, while older boys wore Sinatra-style Trilbys and Mackintoshes.”

Inevitably, by 1972, copies of the Weejun loafer were worn by 12-year-old wannabe skinheads in places as remote as Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. Picture pre-teenagers dressed like middle-aged American lawyers on vacation.

But still, there was no stopping the slipper. In the mid 1970s American-loving soul boys sported the item until punk rock decreed all slip-ons punishable by death. Yet, a few years later they were back as part of the Rockabilly 501 turned-up selvage denim and T-shirt look that, misappropriated by a host of boy bands, spread the popularity of the shoes even further while almost destroying its street cred… But not quite. Since then the shoes’ reputation has remained intact. As with many pieces of clothing, substandard copies have actually increased the shoes kudos and that of its wearer. It’s just not good enough to wear a facsimile or even a homage as only the real deal will do. And those that know… know. bassshoes.com

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STYLE HISTORY CULTURE VOLUME 1 ISSUE 6

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