Fascinating 1980 program presented by Danny Baker, who fiercely argued in the pages of the NME at that time for jazz-funk as the real-deal music c.f. the constipated faux-funk of A Certain Ratio and Gang of Four, and here takes the battle to the television screen.
In the program, he just uses the word "funk", though.
Bunch of things that jumped out at me
1/ The self-conscious organization of the scene around tribes - a local squad or crew like Frontline from Brixton - who then at the dances amalgamate into a mega-tribe, which deejay Chris Hill here describes as the Family. The tribes have their own regalia - sometimes T-shirts with the tribe name, sometimes some other goofy identifying element - and they also often bring banners that they drape over the balcony at the venue.
2/ You would tend to think of U.K. working class scenes oriented around black-music to be very much about style and elegance. What surprised me about the Funk All-Dayers captured here is how amiably uncool the dancing and the general larking about is.... It's very much not in the tradition of Mod, it's not about a Face dancing alone in this moat of personal space.... the deejays exhort and entrain the crowd to all kinds of daft behaviour that is collective and synchronised.... they seem to be consciously trying to create the crowd-body consciousness, like in spectator sports with the Mexican wave... Then there's individual kids who take off all their clothes.... a wonderfully silly mass sing-along 'n' dance to the Ovalteenies theme (you'll recognise that from Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore - "we're happy girls and boys"). And perhaps most bizarre of all - a fad for building human pyramids on the dancefloor (something I've only ever seen at Enter Shikari shows).
As Hill explains - again it's interesting just how self-conscious he is about how it all works as a subcultural machinery - the get-away Weekends at Caister and other seaside resorts are about escalating this sense of the scene as a world unto itself. A world where normal rules of behaviour get suspended and overturned in a carnivalesque fashion (not to put too Bakhtinian a spin on it though -it is also rather Club 18-30). "Pride and dignity", the soul-boy ethos, doesn't come into it. But it's also very different from how people danced and behaved on the Northern Soul scene.
3/ The other thing that came across was that the fervour seems to be somewhat out of proportion to the music... Now I love funk, indeed particularly at this time (early 80s) I loved it with a convert's fetishistic passion - but while I wouldn't describe myself as a connoisseur, I always felt that the jazz-funk, especially the UK offerings but most of the US imports then too, tended to be a bit bantamweight. There are some great tunes but there's a lot of slick 'n' tepid. I put that down to the same dynamic on the Northern scene where there's a fetish for obscurity. Instead of rare soul singles that were barely released in 1965 or whenever, in the jazz funk scene it seems to be about a deep cut on an import album, something tucked away on side 2 of a Tom Browne or Grover Washington Jr LP.
But perhaps the music is simply a pretext for identity, a trigger for fervour, an excuse to mobilize. Still, it's a little weird when Hill says that after going to a weekend away in Great Yarmouth, the kids become fully committed, like "they've been on a campaign. And the music is a crusade".
The larking about has always struck me as a bit atavistic: it’s almost as if the youngsters are revisiting the Cockney knees-up vibe that their parents may have enjoyed (and I suppose this is most apparent with the Ovaltineys sing-song). A few years earlier, in 1975, there was a full-on 1940s revival at the Goldmine in Canvey Island, with Chris Hill spinning the likes of Glenn Miller and the kids dressing up in GI garb and what not. Worth noting though that the Goldmine retro soulies were likely at the cutting-edge of fashion and clubbing etc, rather than the lumpen-funketariat in Danny Baker’s film. Just to note here that I badgered my mum to buy me a Glenn Miller record in 1975 (I was eight). I think the Goldmine scene may have been picked up by Nationwide or the Daily Express or something.
ReplyDeleteRe the actual music, jazz funk is only one element. It would be more accurate to say that the scene at this time was jazz funk and soul. (There used to be a pirate station that broadcast in London in the early 80s called JFS). Much of the music that was popular on the scene circa 79/80 (and which sometimes reached the lower slopes of the Top 40) wasn’t slippery jazz funk but sometimes rather rhythmically clunky (Edwin Starr’s ‘Contact’ for example). Easier to drink your lager to, when balanced atop a human pyramid. Jazz funk is really “disco funk” – it’s all about guys like Herbie Hancock and Donald Byrd gettin’ paid – and when the bottom fell out of disco in 1979, it fell out of disco jazz too. There’s hardly any decent US jazz funk from ’81 on, it gets very insipid (although the UK scene is quite lively c. ’81 – Freeez, Level 42, Incognito).
This film was recorded in early 1978 and gives a good impression of a rather bifurcated scene: hardcore (mainly Black) dancers at Brixton, and partying (mainly White) revellers at Canvey. Canvey seems more fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOhLMyjXbko
James Hamilton’s Disco Pages, a compilation of his Record Mirror columns published last year, is a great primary source for all this. Haven’t read it all yet, but the early years (76-77) are less scene-y and the columns cater for all types of jocks – hence the likes of the Wurzels appearing in monthly top 50s. Television even get a mention (Marquee Moon 12”).
There was also an outgrowth of the jazz funk scene called jazz dance, which a guy called Seymour Nurse gives a detailed account of here:
https://www.thebottomend.co.uk/Seymour_Nurses_Jazzifunk_Club_Jazz_Chart.php
I thought you might have something to say on this Edmund :)
DeleteThe Ovalteenies thing does seem to be some kind of Blitz Spirit, 1940s, keep calm and carry on funking thing
Those kids don't seem lumpen-funkentariat really... they are smartly if casually dressed, quite articulate, well-spoken.... but in the right environment they were prepared to make fools of themselves, which both surprised me and charmed me... none of that snooty rare groove twat at the Wag club vibe... they don't seem like the sort of kids who would ever have read The Face, they'd have relied on Echoes and Blues 'n' Soul.... they're not into posing, they want to party
It's not even rowdiness at Caister, just boisterousness
You know what, I downloaded that British Hustle a while ago and intended to post about it here but then completely forgot... I wonder where it shown? As a double bill with another movie?
ReplyDeleteInteresting how the director of Revolver makes prolonged use of split screen to dissolve the space between the audience and Hi Tension. I seem to remember the audience was always central to the presentation of the programme, but perhaps it was unusual to use split screen to this degree? Phonogram released a Light of The World remix LP in the summer of 1981 that always seems to get overlooked in round-ups of remix albums from the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know about that LOTW remix album, and it reminds me that the Blackbyrds also released a remix album in '78 called Night Grooves. Re: the British Hustle film, it was recorded in early '78 and released as part of a double-bill with the sci-fi thriller Capricorn One in January '79. I got this info from the James Hamilton book, which I can't recommend too highly for anyone interested in UK pop/club culture.
ReplyDeleteCapricorn One is a fantastic film: a Seventies paranoia classic that still resonates today with its themes of government conspiracy and missions to Mars. No idea what the crossover is with jazz-funk. But it sounds like a great double bill.
DeleteI was about to make the disco connection - in her cultural history of it, Hot Stuff, Alice Echols explicitly links the bass-heavy fusion she was listening to in the mid-70s to why she gravitated towards disco so quickly. Another slightly older white queer, David Mancuso, played plenty of it at The Loft of course
ReplyDeleteI'll stick up for fusion/jazz-funk, but it is apparent that by the late 70s/early 80s, it was getting pushed into a rut by tying to tread water in the disco flood and by the tentativeness shown by figures like Byrd and Hancock - if they weren't simply in it for 'gettin' paid', it was certainly the most redeeming factor in their work of that era. Ironically, Hancock seemed to be somewhat rejuvenated by embracing the kind of hyper, jagged aesthetic introduced by early hip-hop and by...punk-funk groups like the Gang of Four and Pop Group. (The key connection being Rockit co-producer Bill Laswell)
As someone who grew up in a working class environment in the east of England at around the time this scene was going, it's a bit disconcerting to me that I didn't know ANYBODY who was into it. I do remember it was quite common to see fly posters for the Caister soul weekenders, but it was a mystery who went to them. Which means that this wasn't really a part of people's identity, it was more just what they did of a weekend, often by stumbling into it ("We went once with Trevor, and now we go as often as possible.")
ReplyDeleteBut there was lots of this kind of thing at the time - Country & Western festivals, 1950's/Rockabilly weekends, American car gatherings, etc. I'm really not sure how any of this was much different from the Sealed Knot Society.
It was big in my school in southern England. Of the boys who were interested in music, it seemed roughly 50/50 Jazz-Funk / Metal & Prog, with a small minority of Post-Punk / New Romantics.
DeleteI should also say that I always saw Northern Soul, Caister soul weekenders, Rockabilly, etc. not as "youth" scenes, but more as young adult to early-middle-age scenes, i.e. more for people in their late 20's to late '30's. I suspect that is the main reason why this area is relatively unexplored by pop-cultural historians.
ReplyDeleteHere are young people in Bristol reviving Northern Soul, in the way some teens and twentysomethings in the 80s would go Swing dancing: https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c2ljr0q5d9ko
DeleteNot quite the Wigan Casino! But maybe it just needs a bit of time.
DeleteWhen I think back to my late teens and early twenties, the vast majority of the "scenes" I experienced weren't really youth-related, or generational, but had an age spectrum up to early-thirties. So often I would go to some kind of club, and I would be one of the youngest people there. I remember the (extremely unfashionable) Acid Jazz scene, which some friends used to drag me along to, and it would be an oasis of bald pates.
Amazing in hindsight how many of my youthful experiences began with "Fuck me, what's this?"
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