Ahoy there, me hearties (pirate encounters)

Well, a dream comes true - I appear on a pirate radio station. Except it's legal now, but still - Rinse FM!

I am talking - alongside Martin Clark aka Blackdown - about Burial's debut album, which came out 20 years ago - on Eclecticist's show on Rinse.  

Now I think about it, I have been on a pirate before - twice in fact. 

The first time was inadvertent: BBC radio (I think Radio 4) had done a report on jungle, then emerging, in the summer of 1994, and the reporter came around to our flat to get some quotes from me. And immediately after it aired, one of the pirates - Kool FM if I recall right - pirated it. Played the whole program a few times on the radio. So there I was, coming over the airwaves of the station I most  frequently tuned into at that time. (In 1994, after 8 years living in South London, I had finally made it North of the River and was living in Belsize Park, slipping out of range of my beloved Don FM but in compensation able to pick up Kool and other pirates that had mostly been out of reach when living in Brixton). 

Another time I actually deejayed on a pirate - but this was not a nuum pirate, it was a sort of hipster pirate in Williamsburg.  Sometime in the early 2000s. I played gloomcore and stuff like that, but the guy before me played Anthony Braxton and such. So the station was a bit like The Wire on the air.  I have no idea if anyone listened. Still, a buzz to do. 

A few times I have been inside an actual functioning London pirate station - Flex FM at the height of 2step in 2000, that was in South West London, a big if delapidated house, when reporting on UK garage for Spin. Deekline was spinning.

And then in 2005, again reporting for Spin, this time on grime, I got to go inside Rinse FM's HQ, a basement of a building near Whitechapel. It had once been a travel agents and it was surprisingly smart looking still (compared with Flex FM). They even had a sort of ante-room with a sofa in it, and then the actual room where the deejaying took place - the Ruff Sqwad followed by Roll Deep - was quite tidy. And actually now I recall it was Martin Clark who made the connection for me and came long to the session (thrilling to watch close up - the young Skepta was there). So big up Blackdown. 

Here's what I wrote about Burial in 2006 when I reviewed it for The Observer Music Monthly

Burial

Burial

(Hyperdub)

The mystery-shrouded artist known only as Burial is affiliated to the dubstep scene, a  sister-genre to grime that this year looks set to eclipse its waning sibling. Running in parallel for the past half-decade, both these London underground sounds rely on the same pirate radio infrastructure and share a common history in UK garage and jungle. But dubstep is a largely instrumental style bigger on mood than personality (no shouty MCs here). It’s also a site-specific music, its bass-heavy menace achieving full impact only through a massive sound system in a dark, crammed club. Burial’s self-titled debut is the first record from the scene to transcend that context. It evocative atmospherics and enfolding  ambience make it a perfect lose-yourself soundtrack for headphones or lights-low living room listening

“Distant Lights” blueprints the basic Burial sound: an ominously amorphous bass-rumble and a frantic-yet-subdued 2step beat are countered by the slow-motion mournfulness of the track’s other elements, a yearning vocal sample and a reverb-blurry trumpet, like Kenny Wheeler wilting in a Temazepam swoon. Titles like “Night Bus” pinpoint Burial’s subject as the melancholy and anomie of city life, while “Southern Comfort” localizes the vibe further to South London. But the feeling this music creates--imagine The Blue Nile of “Downtown Lights” but with the euphoria turned to sorrow--is something any metropolis-dweller anywhere on the planet will understand: sensations of  grandeur and possibility battling with desolation and entrapment.  There’s a simmering, suppressed violence bubbling inside Burial’s music, hinted at in titles like “Wounder,” which conjures images of a city full of damaged people ready to inflict damage on others. But there’s also a hovering grace and tenderness that makes me think of Wings of Desire, a quality that emerges most clearly on “Forgive,” a beatless ache of sound threaded with the sounds of cleansing rainfall.

This album actually comes complete with a concept (it’s a sound-portrait of a near-future South London submerged under water, New Orleans-style) while the most persuasive readings of the album hear it as a requiem for the lost dreams of  rave culture. But the non-specific sadness that shimmers inside this music ultimately transcends attempts to pin it to a place, period, or population. You can imagine Burial’s tremulous poignancy reaching out to hurt and heal all kinds of listeners--fans of David Sylvian and Harold Budd, Massive Attack and Boards of Canada, Radiohead and Joy Division. This music can go far. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I am reading Moby Dick at the moment - it's incredible, but it's taking me a long time - and one thing that surprised me is that seafaring men of that era did actually address each other en masse as "me hearties" e.g. "pull hard, my hearties" when rowing a small boat in pursuit of a whale