Feature: Overpaid, oversexed and over here

THE first time Charles Gettis came to the UK was as a private in the 91st Airborne Division of the US Army. His first sight of the country came through the early morning November mists covering the vast open spaces of the Greenham Common airbase near Newbury, Berkshire as he stepped out of the belly of a huge USAAF cargo plane onto the tarmac below.

Now long discharged from the army, the 26-year-old Gettis has returned to the UK in an altogether different role, in the guise of his turntablist alter-ego, Deejay Punk-Roc. He’s one of a small group of American DJs who have set up home here to take advantage of the burgeoning club scene which grew up in the wake of the acid house explosion of 1988.

Gettis, working in a series of dead-end jobs after he left the military, found his options severely limited in his home town of Brooklyn. The story goes that Andrew Erskine, the head of Merseyside independent label Airdog, somehow heard Punk-Roc’s self-produced My Beatbox, visited him in Brooklyn and persuaded him that he could make a splash in the UK by promoting his music on the back of his not-inconsiderable DJing skills. He didn’t have to ask twice.

Based in Toxteth, Liverpool since January, Gettis’s gamble has paid off in a big way. He’s been pleasantly surprised by the speed and scale of his success. His debut album Chickeneye was released to almost unanimously positive reviews last month, while he returned to the States to support the Prodigy on a two-week tour.

On his return to the UK, he played a couple of gigs, including one at NY Sushi in Sheffield, before jetting off the a festival in Holland. Next week he releases Far Out, another single from the album. A trip to Japan is scheduled for the autumn. It’s non-stop.

“For some people, what’s happening to me now might be a dream come true, but not for me – cause I never even dreamed it in the first place,” says Gettis as he relaxes in his hotel room after the Sheffield date. “I’ve been making music for as long time, but it was never made to be pressed up and sold to the public. I thought that music was something that other people made and I bought.”

Interview: Amp Fiddler

JOSEPH ‘Amp’ Fiddler has a theory that conversations are the dynamic for change in our lives and I’m with him all the way.

How true this is when you’re speaking over the phone, I’m not so sure. Surely you need to be close enough to be able to see the whites of their eyes to really have a chance to know what’s going on in someone’s head?

It’s a shame not to meet the guy in person. Fiddler cuts a striking figure. Tall  – well over six feet when you take into account his hair, which fluctuates between dreads and an impressive afro – distinguished, and a snappy dresser to boot, Amp resembles nothing so much as a latterday funky Malcolm X, stepping out to an afterhours jazz den in his wraparound shades, polo neck and leather raincoat.

But he’s in France, midway through a lengthy European tour, relaxing before tonight’s gig and I’m in the UK, midway through production day, not relaxing before the magazine goes to press. We’ll have to try our best.

Thinking about it, it’s unlikely I’d be able to see the whites of Fiddler’s eyes anyway  one, he’s on tour so they’re probably a little red around the edges (“we’ve been having a lot of fun,” he drawls) and two, he’s rarely seen without sunglasses, even indoors.

Fiddler, however, has been in this game a lot longer than I have and he fields my questions like the seasoned pro he is, his rich, melifluous  if, occasionally, a little croaky  voice booming over the line from Lyon.

The tour is going well. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he “most definitely enjoys the European way of life” and only wishes the weather was a little better, “but it’s okay. I been having a great time.”

Roughly half of the people in his audiences have already heard his astonishingly assured debut solo album, Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly he estimates (well, he actually recorded his debut for a major label at the start of the Nineties, but it wasn’t a happy or rewarding experience); the other half haven’t but, “our show is very dynamic, so if people don’t get it by the middle of the show, they definitely get it by the end. But,” he adds with a chuckle, “most of them get it in the beginning.”

Old enough to say “record” when he means “CD”, young enough to know who Dizzee Rascal is (he recently bought Rascal’s album for his son Dorian), Fiddler is also polite enough not to mention it when I get the titles of his songs wrong or interrupt him, mid sentence. He doesn’t let things bother him. He’s playing a long game. He turned 46 last week but isn’t unduly perturbed: “The older the fiddle, the better the tune.”

Hyperbole: Punk is dead but music is free

WHERE are the old punks on Twitter? There are more 30-something DJs tweeting their brains out than you could shake a shitty stick at, but the generation of stay-up-forever party animals before them don’t seem to have caught the bug in quite the same way.

They’re all over Facebook, MySpace and most other online social media platforms you’d care to mention, from the well-meaning and informative but occasionally holier-than-thou Southern Records forum to the irreverent and endlessly diverting website born out of the legendary Kill Your Pet Puppy fanzine. But very few have made it onto Twitter.

Of course, Boy George tweets. He was, and remains, as punk as fuck. Ditto Alternative Tentacles, clearly, and the Gang of Four too. Okay, and Justin Broadrick. And ACR. I also have my suspicions about the not-so-secret pasts of people like Graeme Park and Luke Solomon. But where is Viv Albertine? The Shend from the Cravats? Jimmy Pursey? Pauline Murray? Cal from Discharge? Mensi? Are you out there?

Apparently not. They’ve probably got better stuff to do. Which is a shame, because I think Cal from Discharge would be able to do wonderful things with 140 characters – although they’d probably all be capitals, exclamation marks and downward smiley-faces :(

@Cal_from_Discharge AIN’T NO FEEBLE BASTARD, AIN’T NO FUCKING SCAPEGOAT!!! Also, thinking about what to have for tea 1 day ago

Feature: The Band on the Wall, reborn

THERE are plenty of venues in Manchester that are bigger than the Band on the Wall, and there may even be a few with a higher profile – but none of them can boast the same kind of musical pedigree.

A tavern, pub and venue which, in one form or another has been entertaining successive generations of Mancunians for the best part of 200 years, singing, dancing, drinking and carousing are part of the very fabric of the Band on the Wall.

Indeed, the interior of the newly-refurbished and expanded venue, situated on Swan Street in the city centre, was for much of its life darkly lacquered with nicotine stains, spilled drinks, more than a little shoe-leather and the sweat from the brows of a thousand dancers, lovingly reapplied over the course of decades.

For some, this only enhanced the gritty authenticity of the venue. For others, attracted by a uniquely visionary and diverse live music programme, it was a case of holding your nose and tiptoeing around the Band on the Wall’s flooded nether regions. Either way, the building’s deficiencies were beginning to get in the way of the entertainment it offered and it finally closed its doors in 2005, with a promise to return bigger and better at some undefined point in the future.

Four years later, the gleaming venue is preparing to open its doors once again.

Interview: Steve Albini

ANOTHER reprint from the annals of GRUNT magazine, this time an interview with legendary guitar-botherer, microphone enthusiast and In Utero, Surfer Rosa and Pod engineer Steve Albini.

After Big Black imploded at the height of their dark, angry power, Albini got together with a couple of the guys from the brilliant Scratch Acid and created a band with a name inspired by their favourite cartoon character.

Steve ‘Weave’ Hawkins put them on in Leeds and the Brag editorial board (Mark, Marie, Doug and me) bugged him into letting us interview the band at their contentious Poly gig.

We were all major Big Black fans and we were all appalled by the name of the new band, even though the music they made was pretty fantastic, with Albini’s big, mad old guitar sound placed front and centre. We had to walk through a picket to get into the venue. Great gig. A bit of a strange night though.

* * *

Hyperbole: Back to the Phuture

IT TAKES me a couple of seconds to realise that the Third Davyhulme Scout & Guide Marching Band are playing Hit The North as they turn onto Deansgate in front of us. Somehow their spirited instrumental rendition of Mark E Smith’s tale of useless MPs and big wide streets manages to be utterly ludicrous and totally brilliant at exactly the same time, perfectly setting the tone for the rest of the Procession put together by Jeremy Deller in collaboration with the people (and football club mascots) of Greater Manchester.

Criticised, a little unfairly I think, for not attracting more Manchester residents to Manchester International Festival in 2007, MIF director Alex Poots wanted to find a big, high-profile, mass-participation, free event for the festival’s opening weekend and with thousands of people lining the parade route, Procession seems to have done the trick.

While Deller has a history of tackling big ideas, people are always at the very heart of his work and it is the people of Manchester who make the parade – and the city – what it is. Poignant, daft, inspiring, hilarious and baffling in equal measure, it perhaps sums up the complexities and contradictions of Manchester as well as any official census or commercial survey.

“I love parades, so I’d like to do my own parade about a town that I have a lot of love for,” Deller told me at the festival launch. “Even though I don’t live here, it means a lot to me as a part of Britain. It’s a town I’ve been interested in for years. You come up here and the buildings are really telling you about the past. You feel it, you feel the history. I find that very exciting, walking around.”

Interview: Antisect

ALONGSIDE Discharge with their “screeching haikus”, Antisect were right at the very limit of what I deemed acceptable in terms of hardcore punk adopting the dynamics of heavy metal.

They were an intensely powerful live band, but it’s fair to say they were none too subtle. My main impression is of gigantic riffs, loads of feedback and even more shouting. And Sideshow Bob-style spiderplant hair, of course.

And they all seemed to be called Pete.

I got to interview them twice in the space of less than a year, first in Leeds and then in Gateshead, either side of the release of their debut album, In Darkness There Is No Choice. The interviews tell two very similar tales of perfectly affable people confronted with the relentless drunken negativity of a fanzine ediot who when it came down to it, just enjoyed arguing as much as anything else.

They were a little more relaxed second time around and among many world exclusives came the extraordinary and shocking news that they actually owned a television set.

Feature: Radio Mentals

WHILE Richard Curtis probably isn’t someone you would turn to for stark social realism, the story of pirate radio deserves a slightly more serious appraisal than that found in his latest happy-go-lucky comedy, The Boat That Rocked.

Curtis’s Sixties-set tale of high-jinks on the high seas has received mixed reviews – “fine if it were funny, but auto-pilot Curtis prevails”, said one reviewer; “I am going to email Richard Curtis and tell him I hate him and ask for my money back,” said another – but unlicensed radio remains a staple of British culture to this day.

In The Boat That Rocked, much is made of the fact that a hopelessly out-of-touch BBC played just 45 minutes of the new-fangled pop music per day, meaning that pop-hungry teenagers had no option but to tune into stations that took the music they loved more seriously.

In reality, despite attracting daily audiences of up to 25million people, the pirates’ brash and breezy US-style of commercial radio was anathema to Harold Wilson’s Labour government – although the official line was that pirate radio broadcasts had the potential to blot out the signals of legally-sanctioned stations, as well as emergency services and air traffic control communications.

The then-Postmaster General Tony Benn declared war on the pirates in 1965 with the promise, “the future does not exist for them”.

Although the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967 sank the pirates anchored just outside British waters, and a couple of years later Radio One (fronted by many former pirate DJs) soaked up their audience, unlicensed radio never really went away.

Hyperbole: Flux and Freaks, Twitter ye not

EAGLE-EYED readers will have noticed that Expletive Undeleted now has its own ‘Twittery-Twattery’ feed (down there on the right) where I talk about all the things I can’t be arsed blogging about, in 140 characters or less.  Come join the party. You will get spammed by PR twats! Yay!

There are also a few new additions to the blogroll – Manchester arts and culture supremo Mancubist, superlative resource for all things clubby / DJing / house music-related, Resident Advisor, and the fairly self-expanatory Easy Listening World.

And while we’re at it, visit History Is Made At Night for more of Transpontine’s fascinating and informative words on the politics of dancing, all around the world, right through the ages. Marvellous and inspiring stuff.

And while we have our dancing shoes on, the ever-generous Freaks are giving away mp3s of two versions of a new song, the groovy and very beautiful Black Shoes, White Socks. All your need to get your ears on these bits of top notch bendy house music is go to the Music For Freaks website and sign your life away.  You probably won’t regret it.

Kev H from the recently re-defunct Flux got in touch to let me know that Hard Night Out, the Professor Green track which samples Tube Disaster by Flux, finally looks like getting a formal release. Head over here to see the vid. I think they might be getting a percentage so let’s make it a hit, eh chaps?

Interview: Shaun Ryder*1

WHEN Shaun Ryder – erstwhile actor, author, newspaper columnist, Salfordian crooner, lyrical genius and a man who was banned from Channel Four for saying the fuck-word at tea time – sits you down in his living room and says that he wants to tell you a story, you listen.

“I was walking down Deansgate the other day,” he begins, with a sly look playing across those famously unrefined features. “And a naked man with a big wand touched me on the shoulder and turned me into a frog. And I could see meself in the shop windows. I was a frog!”

Ryder, TV remote in one hand, bottle of lager in the other, pauses for effect. Maybe coming to the Peak District to interview him in his natural element wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“I turned around the corner and turned back into meself and an alien spacecraft picked me up and took me off on a journey, right?”

What are you on about?

“Every time I go to court, they quote all this stuff I’m supposed to have said in the papers as fact – even stuff from the Sport, which has had ‘We find B52 bomber on the moon’ as its front page headline,” Ryder finally explains. “So I’m telling you that little story there. I can pull that out in court now.”

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems with Shaun Ryder.