I’m let into a council flat on the first floor of a red brick tenement on Battersea Bridge Road, one mile from the richest area in town. Inside is a dilapidated series of rooms, the main one adapted from a 4 x 4 living room into a bedroom, the bed unmade, and the walls covered in photos of grinning black school kids and a dazed-looking man stood in front of a pile of speakers. On the bed, looking disheveled and distinctly un-star-like sits Bunny Lee. He is in London on a flying visit, dressed in an oversized American football top and shorts, his ash grey hair kept in place by a sea captain’s hat which he puts on for photographs. He is unwilling to answer any questions; it takes him 40 minutes and a phone call to his biographer to convince him.

Tappa Zukie walks in and explains: “The Englishman want everything for themself. What we need to talk about is how everyone is trying to take away the reggae from us. The Englishman dem try and take it away from us, and they treat it better so we try and hand it over without them even trying to steal it.” 

The poverty of Bunny, one of the handful of men who invented dub, is living proof of Tappa Zukie’s statement. I tell them that they would help introduce dub music to a wider audience, Clash’s audience. “We’ve been introducing the music to you for forty years” says Lee tiredly, his grey football top riding up above his huge, stretch-marked belly as he leans back and makes another call.

Dub music began in 1968 when, during a recording session at Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle Studio in Kingston, the engineer forgot to put the vocal on a track. This instrumental version was very soon after played at another sound system operator’s dance, teasing a new excitement out of the crowd that spurred Bunny Lee, who was present for that fateful mistake, to coin the concept of the instrumental ‘B-Side’.

Lee goes on to explain how King Tubby developed on the mistake: “Now Tubbs take it a step further. Soon after he play at a big party [with his sound system Hometown HiFi]. Tubbs start off with a Slim Smith tune, ‘Me Ain’t Too Proud To Beg’ and he start with the vocal part, and then him drop it out and lick in the pure riddim. Then him drop in part of de voice once more.”

So much has been written about dub music, about the deep effects it creates, that it is better to leave descriptions to another man. As critic Mark Fisher had it: “Dub works through hints, suggestions and feints: [which] function not as teases but as positive deviations from both climax and idling on the spot…Desire is neither engorgement nor emaciation, but…how to get the right amount you need to keep moving.”

Every producer of the golden era of dub had his trademark: Joe Gibbs and his studio partner Errol Thompson pioneered the delay echo, Lee Perry was the king of the fazer, that rustling, ‘wet’ sound you can hear in his roughshod dub, Bunny Lee was the creator of the jarring cymbal, like sheet metal being struck, and King Tubby was the master of the ‘double exposure’, a fixing of bass and treble frequencies that allowed them to both play in clean equilibrium.   

This was the sound of Jamaica, a Jamaica that, if it wasn’t for UK demand, would never have had its dub exported further, whatever Tappa Zukie says. It was label men like Chips Richards and Lee Gopthal that in the early 1970s would encourage Jamaican artists to tack together collections of instrumental ‘B-Sides’ and dubbed ‘versions’ to fuel the hunger for the UK market of [as a contemporary Adrian Sherwood describes to me] “people sitting at home, listening to wacked-out dub stuff smoking weed.”    

Dennis Bovell had created possibly the first UK dub ‘tune’ in aged 16 in 1969, in a bell tower opposite Wandsworth Prison. He used a quarter-inch tape loop and a recording of his teacher playing ‘Guantanamera’ on flute. Bovell’s troubled history with racism in the UK [he was targeted and wrongfully convicted for inciting an affray in 1974] didn’t stop him from forming fruitful cross-alliances between punk and post-punk and dub music from Jamaica. He was an avid fan of King Tubby – creating pure dub LPs as Blackbeard that aped his mentioned ‘double-exposure’ technique – whilst simultaneously using dub as a foil to one of the most unique voices in UK punk – Ari Up’s.

Up’s love of reggae music has been well documented, and Bovell tells me how on tracks like ‘New Town’ he would balance Ari’s quaver with deep bass. At the same time he would implement styles of musique concrète into his dub production – ‘New Town’ was partly about heroin, so he would – in order – tap an ashtray with a spoon, shuffle a box of matches, then strike a match. Bovell also created dub music for Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry, and would explain to me how Johnson’s poetry books would be the first written dub: “In one of his books the first three pages would read ‘blood, blood, blood’, just written again and again. The next three pages would be just ‘fire, fire, fire’. Then it occurred to me that he was actually writing in dub, using the same echoes as in the music.”

While Bovell was adapting punk into dub, elsewhere in the UK Adrian Sherwood and his On-U sound brought Jamaica smashing into the face of British punk. Sherwood harnessed the power of artists like Prince Far-I, ‘the daddy of rough voice’ [also nicknamed ‘Prince Cry Cry’ for his habit of breaking into tears when extremely angry]. Far-I was a bulky, trouble-prone Jamaican dub chanter who with gigs at venues like the 100 Club in London would attract artists like Billy Idol, The Slits and the well-known dub heads John Lydon and Paul Simonon. Far-I would form part of Sherwood’s pivotal ‘Singers and Players’ collective, the first and only dub supergroup comprising of singers Bim Sherman, Prince Hammer, Far-I and Mikey Dread

Far-I, a former bouncer, was close friends with Claudie Massop, the infamous JLP strong man of 1970s Jamaica and leader of the Shower Posse of Tivoli Gardens, and when Massop was assassinated in 1979 it has been suggested that Far-I’s protection in the Kingston ghettos was gone. In 1983 he was shot dead alongside his wife at his home in Kingston. His cousin recalled the scene: “In the living room you see the blood with his fingermarks all over the wall, [like] when person [is] in agony.”

Sherwood’s interest in dub led to a resuscitation of Lee Perry’s career in 1986, with some bumps along the way: one story recalls an On-U Sound boat cruise of the same year featuring Mark Stewart and Bim Sherman when Perry, hanging out in Sherwood’s East Ham home before the cruise, drank a bottle of Polish vodka before boarding the ship and doing karaoke lying on his back as the boat sailed past the Houses of Parliament. Due to suspected drugs on board, the boat began being tailed by the police, for Perry to get on the megaphone and scream back at them across the dark river: “Back off Babylon! Fire on your head on the river Thames!”

 With 1973’s ‘Blackboard Jungle Dub’ album, Lee Perry is the author of one of the five dub albums that vie for a place as the first ever recorded. Bunny Lee remembers Perry’s famed tendency for improvisation and off-the-cuff conducting: “We used to experiment a lot. You would be playing and Scratch would come up to you and go [makes tearing sound and gesture] and it sound good inna de control room. Scratch even get man to play domino inna de studio, slamming dem down for people to record.”

Speaking to me about his use of technology, or lack thereof, Perry says: “The four-track that I work on was just four, but they could not find the other twenty. The other twenty was the spirit…” he ends, laughing softly. In an unexpected stream of invective he adds: “King Tubby didn’t have any spirit to teach him, Tubby didn’t have any righteousness in him, any godliness in him, didn’t have any rastafari in him. Tubby is the meanest man that ever live on the planet earth. Totally mean. So mean that they did come and shoot him.”   

He signals the difference between Tubby [acknowledged globally as the originator of the remix] and himself: “King Tubby never make live recordings with musician – King Tubby only use his mixing board and go over riddim they a making in the studio. The difference between me and King Tubby is that me [conduct] the [live] riddims on my side, and he did not make the riddims on his side him only mix them. Him not my competition. They working like scavenger, they just mixing, not creating.”

Back in Battersea, Bunny Lee is also cursing the scavengers. The name of one prominent European dub producer, comes up, and he starts shouting: “What him know about dub? Him nuh come from Jamaica – him make more money out of the business than we. Him a tour and play dub live around the world!” An executive from Jamaican record label Black Solidarity, also perched in the cramped room with Bunny Lee, expands: “[The unnamed producer] is a carbon copy of dub. I’m a explain: if you go to Steve Jobs, and you say to him, we have a copy of an iPhone  – him gonna laugh at you, It’s the same with Bunny Lee and dub.”

Speaking to Pupajim, the French dub collective, one could not see a more different picture of the positive adoptions of the Jamaican blueprint. Jim, the singer in the group, gives me a rundown of the sound systems in France, which include Pupajim’s Stand High Patrol in their native Brest, and others like Zion Gate from Nantes, OBF from Geneva, Blackboard Jungle from Rouen and Chalice Sound from Lille. As well as clear Jamaican and UK influences, he cites an early contact with “French new wave artists like Indochine, Gainsbourg and Christophe. I didn’t like their lyrics but their production was an influence – we particularly liked 80s digital reggae like Wayne Smith’s ‘Under Me Sleng Teng’ – and they used similar drum machine patterns.”

The progression from dub to cyberdub is vast –  in terms of vocals, Sherwood had singers like Prince Far-I, Basic Channel had Tikiman, while more liberal definitions of dub like hip hop and jungle had  crossover artists from reggae in Super Cat and Top Cat respectively. Technologically, we arrive at the amplifiers built by Autechre and Basic Channel’s large lathe cutting facility in Berlin as a logical progression of King Tubby’s homespun rig and small dubplate production unit in Kingston.

Musicality, Mad Professor points out, is perhaps second in importance to a knowledge of electronics and rhythm in dub: “Dennis [Bovell] for example, is  a bit too musical for dub. Dub, when you get to know it, you don’t have to be too musical to make it. More than musicality, there’s something more spiritual in dub: a direct African connection – like in Joe Gibbs’ early work – where the drums became more prominent. When dub is the bridge to what was lost through slavery, and what Africa retained.”

The last word inevitably falls to Perry: “God is the son of the Spirit. Dub is the baby. Baby have no natty dread, no bal’ head. Dub is the electronic baby. He’ll go back to Nigeria, his name is Baby Tafari. Repeat after me! Baby Tafari, off on a jungle safari”.

200 miles northward and three years after the god of punk boofed the five large in the rubbish bag, Andrew Weatherall met Bobby Gillespie at an acid house rave in Manchester. Gillespie handed Weatherall a copy of “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have”, and Weatherall remixed it into a disco’d, slowed down version of acid house as it existed, a glorious, empowering journey of a track: Loaded by Primal Scream.

The Fridge is now the Electric, and Primal Scream are now celebrities from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, but listening to them rock this venue, both having histories that encompass punk, rare groove and hard dance, you felt part of what it is to come from Britain, the source for all these twisting songlines.

Let’s Buy Happiness opened the night, with a great set that vindicated their selection by fans of their set at the Levi’s in store show recently. The group from Newcastle have a great lead in the beautiful Sarah Hall, and promise great things in veins all-Icelandic with their killer track Six Wolves dominating proceedings.

Worship followed, the tipped Reading contingent beautifully amplified by the excellent Electric sound system – the muffled bass of their early hit Collateral an example. In Your Blood was lighter, and perhaps more successful – the pinks and purples of the stage lights evoking a welcome tenderness.

Primal Scream entered the stage to frenzied, pit-coagulating acclaim. Bobby Gillespie, envelope thin in a lamé gold shirt and Mani with snowy white mane and an easy grin. Three tracks in Mary Pearce, the imperious black singer appeared on stage, and with a “Come on Brixton, let’s have it” opened up the night. Was followed was a carnival. The red, vortexing slinkies of the visuals harked back to a baggy, piano chorded time that I was not old enough to rave to but listened to in my bedroom, extended plays of Higher Than The Sun brought gilt waves of warm, shambling nostalgia coming through in funk waves.

The tracks didn’t come in segments, but in a wave of ten minute long journeys, after long periods of immersion, you snapped back and realized nothing had finished. The golds and blues of the newly painted theatre shone, and I prayed I could have been in the centre, not negotiating the beery side wall between a pile of clothes and a mouthy bloke with a face off the terraces at Ibrox.

The guitar riffs of Loaded saw Mani shine, showing his best during a show dominated by Gillespie. For Rocks Bobby camp-clapped, looped the mic cord around his throat and let it hang, then stopped, walking out with no flourish.

There is a scene in Hype Williams’ film Belly that illustrates his style. Nas, DMX and another friend arrive at DMX’s house after robbing a nightclub. DMX retires to his beige pool table while Nas and his accomplice sit back in the vaulted, white New York loft, in their patent black low-slung pants and scalpeled fades. “I loved this nigga’s crib man. It always reminded me of what I wanted to have, eventually. A phat new crib like his shit? One day…” narrates Nas in his husky teen-octave as they squeak into their cream armchairs. And then they slap on Gummo. You know, Gummo, that fucking weird Harmony Korine film that you always vowed to watch after he did Kids but looked a bit too oddball in the posters to actually invest in. “Your rabbit smells like pussy” screams an eleven-year-old onscreen to at a boy in pink cardboard bunny ears.  The scene jarrs in the sleek white crib, the crew edge uncomfortably on their nice leather seats, and Hype Williams’ double-edged sword cuts sharp into the room.
 
Hype Williams was the richest 29-year old in rap at the turn of the millennium. He might have invented – had Third Eye not got there before in 1993 - the term bling, but basically coloured it in, inventing the Maybach/Cristal/Cessna concept, with stubbornly maverick twist; energising the image that hip hop had, putting it on a global platform and spawning the bugbear of every conscious rapper since – the MTV rap video.

Born in 1970 in Hollis in Queens, New York, the son of a Honduran and an African-American, he went to school with Run-DMC and LL Cool J, and began shooting minor promotional videos for Russell Simmons’ label Def Jam after graduating from tea boy. As a 14-year-old he would watch The Godfather once a week, alongside Scarface, Once Upon a Time in America and 2001: Space Odyssey. He drew his inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jules Verne, J.R. Tolkien and The Chronicles of Narnia.

His pictorial style is focused on colour. His emphasis on light is key – his depictions of olives, lip-gloss primaries like poppy red and indigo were key in giving hip hop a new-found MTV-era profile. His video for Missy Elliot’s ‘The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]‘ is perhaps his most seminal, and illustrated his double-edge angle. He dressed an already overweight and seemingly-unmarketable Elliot in an inflatable bin bag: Elliot remembers meeting with Hype to discuss the outfit: “He told me he wanted to make me look like the Michelin Man. I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ And he was like, ‘Trust me. It’s going to be hot.’” The results were historic. Elliot’s unforgettable teak-purple lips tease you through the fish-eye as she manoeuvres the bubbling air pockets in her trash bag outfit like she was negotiating a rogue body inside the plastic. The trick was to turn Elliot’s weakness into her strength – the hardbody aesthetics of MTV rap chicks turned on its head.

Another important video in Hype William’s catalogue was his ‘Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check’ clip for Busta Rhymes. Here Busta looks like his baseball coat is a strait-jacket he’s trying to escape from, as he chest-beats and hyperacts in a low-rider on a neon avenue, the manic energy infecting across the screen. Williams used wide-screen and fish-eye, as he explains: “For Busta I used wide-angle lenses because he is very animated, a very extreme artist, and I was able to exaggerate his already exaggerated movements.  And Missy Elliott for her ‘The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]’ video.  I was such a fan of all these big French filmmakers and all the Grace Jones projects that redefined the black woman on film and in music that I wanted Missy to have an identity like Grace Jones’s.  Something very new and very different and very European.  When we did her wide-angle stuff, we nailed a specific look for her, and that was really her launchpad.  We made those videos look exactly how we felt about the performances in the songs.”

Hype has his role in some of the side-stories of the bling era. In 1999, he was the prophet of P Diddy’s demise in his ‘Hate Me Now’ video. Diddy and Nas both appeared crucified in the mini-epic – Diddy wanted the scene cut – it wasn’t – later that year Diddy was arrested and Nas’s manager attacked in what spelled a big downslide in Combs’s career.

Downslide was the term that could be loosely applied to the entire industry about that time. In 2000, Williams was described by The Face at The Millennium Dome, where he was coordinating a fashion shoot “While dinner is in transit, Jay-Z appears with a five-man entourage. The diamonds around Jay’s neck shimmer in rainbow shades under the show lights.  Hype rolls up his sleeves and begins thrusting his arms enthusiastically as he explains to Jay, who is due to open the show the next day, what will be expected of him.  Curiously, Hype’s regular soft, measured speech has given way to a rasping, round-the-way vernacular: ‘Niggas be like rhymin’ they rhymes,’ he growls, ‘knowhamsayin? I know you wit dat.’

“The pair retreat into a corner of the auditorium for a quiet word, though it doesn’t stay quiet for long.  ‘Yo Ab!’ Hype bellows over to his right-hand man, Abdur.  ‘Did you get that brochure for the yacht?’  He’s obviously about to acquire the ultimate Big Willie status symbol and is keen to share the news with play king Jay.”

The rainbow shaded diamonds, the yacht brochures, would in a few years all fade into post-credit crunch oblivion for an industry, which along with the rest of the music biz, saw the bottom fall out of its finances with the advent of free download. Videos no longer got million dollar budgets and online saw less people watching MTV.

“Spurred by economic woes and technological advances, younger directors are forging a new hip-hop video aesthetic, using HD cameras and impromptu settings” announced Spin magazine in 2009. “Some financially strapped artists exploit the new directors’ ingenuity to replicate the glossy look of movies or TV shows (or old Diddy clips)”. Diddy clips! Here was Williams’ work, the froth of the champagne wave, spat back out at him by the newbies who were taking his boys’ place on the rap stage. 

Aligned with this development was a remarked change in the quality of Williams’ output. A biting piece in The Village Voice called Williams “incredibly bland”; his approach to Kanye West’s ‘All Of The Lights’ video, was replete with “medium shots of Kanye, Rihanna, and Kid Cudi performing and Kanye on top of a cop car. The viewer’s left waiting for it all to come together; instead, it congeals into a mess.” Williams had varied his output to include feature films, fashion magazine cover shoots [his emphasis on colour and lighting shows how he always approached his videos as a photographer] and commercials [including ‘that’ Gap advert: ‘Gap Khaki Soul’], telling interviewers that he was sick of the restrictive medium of the music video.

As the years went on, the recurring question ‘what was the favourite cut that you did?’ always met with the response: ‘Can It Be All So Simple’ by the Wu-Tang Clan. The video is a pure Staten Island kitchen sink drama, with a sliding camera filming Raekwon detailing the tribulations of life in the New York outer boroughs, boroughs Williams knew. As he says: “I always saw superstardom in my friends. To me they had to be the same size in their music and performance ability as Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Idol.” Through him, they became that. After the excess implodes, Hype remembers the good old days – like Gladys Knight in that favourite Wu-Tang track. Can it be that it was all so simple then.

The exhibition of two such wildly differing painters as Cy Twombly and Nicolas Poussin has incited outrage and interest on the London art scene. Poussin was the 17^th Century Classical painter, Twombly was the 20^th and 21^st century painter in the Abstract Expressionist style. Both painters took heavy inspiration from Classical themes, and produced a collection of work, which, while the titles may be similar, have dramatically and at times shockingly different outcomes.

The basis for this juxtaposition, in the eyes of curator Nicholas Cullinan, is the influence Rome had on both their careers. Both painters arrived at the city aged 30, 323 years apart. The showings of the two painters contain shared antique visions of Venus, Pan, Parnassus and Apollo, and the exhibition is divided into sections covering Arcadia, Bacchanalia and the Four Seasons, which both artists attempted aged 64.

The 323 years that separate these two painters have make for some highly unusual wall-sharing. Whilst Twombly’s works are spreads of light colour on white with scrawled logos and a spare, unfinished look, Poussin’s renditions of Classical and Biblical themes became even more formalized than those of his heroes from the early Italian Renaissance.

Nicolas Poussin was born in 1594 in Normandy. In 1624 he travelled to Rome and as a young artist worked in the studio of Domenichino, the Baroque painter from the Carracci school, who influenced him with his lucid composition and cool colouring. After an early coup with a commission for an altarpiece in St Peter’s, he succumbed to a serious illness and thenceforth adhered to his Classical rejection of the Baroque style - in favour of more measured style on a smaller scale for high-brow patrons from the bourgeoisie. In Peter and Linda Murray’s Dictionary of Art and Artists Poussin’s late style is described as: “Essays in solid geometry, with facial expressions eliminated and immobile figures…they are the logical exposition of his theories: a picture must contain the maximum of moral content expressed in a composition which shall convey its intellectual content.”

Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, a place he would proudly remember had “more columns … than in all ancient Rome and Greece”. His parents first discovered his talent for drawing when he reproduced a Picasso painting on the cover of a monograph they had given him for his twelfth birthday. He became friends with figures like Robert Rauschenberg, travelling with him to Europe and North Africa in 1952. By 1957 he went to Rome and quickly adopted Classical themes in his painting before marrying an Italian heiress who was the sister of a wealthy patron of the arts in the city. He lived out much of his life in the city in a palazzo near the Farnese where he worked at a happy seclusion from the Abstract Expressionists he had left behind in New York. His real fame would only come in 1987 when an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery opened the floodgates for widespread critical acclaim. 

The first room of the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery does not quite convey the full dissonance of the works displayed: we are greeted with two curving octagons by Twombly which contain a sea in whipping, vivid hunter green slashes and whites, both threateningly alive when compared to the pastoral calm of the Poussin works – a mellow-coloured Roman road with reclining peasants and another low-lit piece, The Arcadian Shepherds. The shepherds in this piece are uncovering an hidden tomb bearing  the inscription: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ . The rustic idyll of these shepherds, and the clashing spray of the Twombly octagons, are both challenged by this reminder of mortality.    

What immediately proceeds is an assault on the senses. The carefully sculptural forms of Poussin with their immediately perceptible rigidities of form are shattered by the white noise of Arcadia with its scribbling on white paper. More successful is the ‘Pan and the Bacchanalia’ section, where we see a liver-coloured smear from Twombly that seems part wine, part excreta mirror the excesses of Bacchus. On the opposite wall we see the same subject handled with a corresponding formality by Poussin. The effect is a tension release.

The final work by Twombly is his The Four Seasons, 1960-1964. This room is a pleasure after the rigours of such an exhibition, and fittingly my favourite was autumn. The mellow fruitfulness [he was a big fan of Keats] is well captured, with a hint of a deeper arterial sap also on the palette. Catch this show while you can, even if you choose to ignore the comparisons and enjoy each artist in his own right.

Why do I have to introduce John Cage? His name should be a salver-balanced card of introduction into the high esteem of any lover of the arts, the equivalent of Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp and Mark Rothko. And yet music never made it quite as far in the 20th century, at least in classical terms, and the world should sit back and ask itself why. In his book, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen, David Stubbs notes that the jarring polyphony of Béla Bartók and György Ligeti was used by Stanley Kubrick to illustrate the high horror of his closing scenes in The Shining; how the atonal school of Japanese music gagaku was used by the ad men to soundtrack migrane in headache commercials. His point is that unlike modern art, modern classical music can be highly distressing through its all-absorbing, immersive presence. We can shut our eyes, but we can’t close our ears.

Cage was a polymath who outside modern classical also embraced the fields of music criticism, printmaking and painting. His most identifiable technique was to incorporate the use of chance, or aleatoric devices in the composition of his music. He composed Concerto For Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra in late 1950 using for the first time, dice to determine the outcome of his work. Later he would programme early computers to throw dice for him. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, in his book The Rest is Noise paints Cage as a skilled publicist who “browsed through the literature of Zen Buddhism which supplied him with an all-accepting, ‘whatever happens will happen’ approach…”        

His supposed “whatever happens will happen” approach is contradicted by his visual work, that I saw flanked by his east London followers in the Waterloo recently. One particularly delineated bow of thread, neat against a mottled page, brought to mind Ted Hughes’ description of Marianne Moore’s conversation: “…a needle / Unresting – darning incessantly / Chain-mail with crewel-work flowers / Birds and fish of the reef / In phosphor-bronze wire”. It is this tension, between the flesh of creation and Cage’s meanness of execution, that can lead us to re-examine Cage’s ‘unassailable’ (as the catalogue boldly refers to him) reputation, through the prism of his drawings.

Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912, but by the 1940s moved to New York and throughout his life there associated with and drew inspiration from visual artists like Pollock, Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg. He would often cross the street to avoid a drunken Pollock on his way through Lower East Side, but would draw a more fruitful association with Rauschenberg. The artist’s plain white canvasses so impressed Cage in 1951 that he decided to create a musical equivalent: 4’33”. This was four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, performed first by pianist David Tudor, who would walk to a piano, open the lid, and sit immobile except for to open and close the lid at the start and end of each movement. There is a work similar to Rauschenberg’s in Cage’s current exhibition: On The Surface [number 22].

The floor was teeming with visitors, all visibly Cage fans – eager for a taste of the legend’s work. The difference, highlighted in Stubbs’ book, between 20^th century art and 20^th classical music is the former’s ability to subsist as ‘an Original’ – ie ‘a Hockney Original’. John Cage died in 1992, and since then no ad originem performance of his music is of course possible. So we are left with the drawings. His colours are much more successful than his thin mean lines – one piece, New River Watercolors, Series I has the taste of washed-out earth sediment in its chicory background and algae trails, to be then revived with a rich marine swoop, and sealed with a light red ring.

The overall feeling of the exhibition is spare and minimalist, with muddled black lines making us think of the hundreds of layers in his Williams Mix, his pioneering experiment with spliced acoustic tape that combined ‘city’, ‘country’ and ‘small’ sounds among many others. He uses pastels in square collages, but even these soft colours have an edge of metal to them, and splinter of the theory that underpinned his every move. 

Interviewed by the American art historian Irving Sandler, Cage said how he felt about the intensity and excitement of Jackson Pollock: “Oh, none of those aspects interested me. I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I’m perfectly happy about my feelings…I don’t want to disturb my feelings, and above all, I don’t want someone else to disturb my feelings.” It is this thought, this stickler’s adherence to “chaotic” theory, the dice, the Zen, that led Cage to leave undisturbed the biggest chaos of all: his emotional subconscious. This would have been the biggest madness of all, one he wanted to leave undisturbed, while the computer threw dice up above.

Extended edit: CLASH MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2011

I spent five years living in Bristol, and two years have passed since I first started thinking of an article on the city’s music. The scenes I have learnt about in the process have filtered into my dreams; Milo from the Wild Bunch mixing at St Paul’s carnival, dressed in a white Kangol flat cap, Nellee Hooper with a black pony tail crouching over a crate of records, always in black and white. But the truth of what it’s like to live in Bristol is not captured in Beezer’s pictures, but in the place’s atmosphere. Goldie told me it was something about the ley lines, the vertebrae of the hills that carve up the city, he remembers the parties “always late summer” – but the truth is that Bristol is predominantly grey, bathed in a sheen of drizzle, with the slight weightlessness of feeling the sea a few miles away, and below the hump of Park Street, the hint of slavery that runs through the town, to borrow from the great Ian Thomson, like the black line in a lobster.

The music that the Wild Bunch eventually created in the last decade of the millennium was a contradiction. The 67 bpm of Blue Lines clothed Bristol’s iron filing downpours in a limpid veil, given warmth by Shara Nelson’s voice and Tricky’s Benzene drawl. However Protection saw the neatness return, the clipped detachment of the title track echo the city’s mild winters, forgetting the fug of black roots threading open downtown. That sound would capture the public taste – as Paul Johnson called it, Protection was the “after-dinner mint” record – which left a lot behind, but in a way true to an unidealized city.               

The tapestry of local scenes, from the post-punk of Nellee Hooper’s Maximum Joy band, to the Thatcherite reggae of 3-D Production, is much richer, in the literal sense, than the gleaming polish of albums like Protection. There were a host of crews, in hip hop, reggae and punk, that if not attaining quite the stature of the Wild Bunch – the precocious early days of Massive Attack – certainly equalled it for stories, experimentation and opposition to adversity.

You can trace Massive Attack straight back to the Rastafarian settlements above Kingston in 1950. It was then that Vin Gordon, the Skatalites’ trombonist, would visit Count Ossie, the first ever Rasta percussionist, for sessions in the drumming circle­. A few decades later, Gordon would end up in St Paul’s, the run-down Bristol ghetto. There he played for Restriction, an obscure reggae band where he nurtured a fledgling guitarist called Rob Smith. Smith [later of Smith & Mighty] would later collaborate on Massive Attack’s “Any Love”, their first single, and the first crest of a movement that smoothed Vodou animism into 90s minimalism down a long curving road.

In the early 1980s the Wild Bunch were the big fish in a small pond, a crew who benefitted from being the first on a less crowded scene, and were also graced with the originality that an isolated scene affords. Their story has been well told – Milo’s ineffable grace, as a selector and a style icon, has become the stuff of legend. Goldie called him “the original b-boy” to Tony Farsides in 2002, and speaking to me he expanded: “Milo gave me my first pair of Wilson hi-tops in black – these were guys who, as far as that b-boy style…I’ve gone to New York and met a lot of hardcore people, Ken Swift or whatever, but in this country, for a guy that had style, and had it down, nailed, Milo definitely. And I think that Nellee before Soul II Soul, before that, when he had long hair and sheepskin…”

When Milo went to prison in the early 80s [apparently standing up for a mate who had actually committed the crime] Nellee Hooper was the only guy who wrote to him. He was the nemesis of rival crews in the area – families like UD4, FBI and 2Bad would vie for recognition in his shadow when he played another set at St Paul’s Carnival dressed in camo trousers, backwards peak-up mesh caps and ammunition belts when the carnival clientele looked like Lionel Ritchie. DJ Krust said you could hear the rig from the other side of Bristol. 

Beezer, who was in their crew and responsible for a lot of the excellent photography in this feature, remembers going to see Newtrament battle the crew in a disused bus depot in Paddington. “When I’d go up to London I’d tell my mum I was going i was going to stay with friends in Cardiff, but I’d actually go to see Mark Stewart [check for a new documentary on him out last month], who had a squat in Colville Terrace in Ladbroke Grove. I used to go to see Shaka with Ari Up, stay up late and get cheap tickets on the tube the next day!” he remembers laughing. Ari Up would supply the crew with a lot of the WBLS radio tapes from New York. Beezer was a massive fan of reggae sound systems in Bristol, particularly Jah Lokko, which he would’ follow’ in the same way a supporter would follow a team. “I would dress like a rasta in those Cornish pasty Clarks and Mark & Spencer cardigans that kind of thing. I was 12-13 at the time.” The other Bristol sound systems he remembers were “Surprise, Jah Revelation, Enterprise, Bastion, Abashanti [not the London one]. Sectortone from Bath – Bath had a small black community – I used to watch them all. I remember the day when Bob Marley died, I was watching Shaka play against Small Axe in Bristol.” Bath also boasted a reggae band called The Rhythm-Ites.

Reggae in Bristol was a big part of ghetto life – their bands weren’t as famous as London’s Aswad or Birmingham’s Steel Pulse – but bands like Talisman and Black Roots – immortalised in John Peel’s statement:  “If anyone tells you that there is no such thing as good British reggae, first tell them that they are a herbert and then listen to Black Roots” – were an important part of vocalisation that took its harshest form in the St Paul’s riots of 1980. “Inna Bristol / We need no pistol / But still we chase the Babylon right outta town”: Linton Kwesi Johnson.   

John Stapleton, a long time Bristol music figure is fresh from putting on a Horace Andy gig in Bristol when he speaks to me, and adds his analysis on Massive Attack’s influences: “Obviously there’s a lot of reggae, there’s a lot of hip hop, there’s a lot of new wavey stuff in it – and if you look at things like Ghost Town by The Specials, that could almost be a Massive Attack tune.”

John, who runs a record shop and the longstanding Bristol dance night, Blowpop, used to be in Def Con, the Bristol DJ crew that began in the early 1980s. His first hip hop track was Grandmaster Flash’s Adventures on the Wheels of Steel. His second was Kurtis Blow’s Tough, after seeing the Wild Bunch scratch a Blow track in one of their sets. “We went up to the first night they did in London  – Krush Groove in [the legendary and mainly goth/new romantic] Gossip’s on Dean Street – a little bunch of us came up from Bristol for it…I met Tim Westwood, who was wearing a safari suit at the time” he remembers, laughing drily.  

 “You had a shotgun under your overcoat didn’t you?” I‘m talking to Goldie, asking him about his days with the Wild Bunch. “Mate – I don’t know what I was thinking, I used to go there and…who told you that anyway?” he butts in, unpredictable, edgy. “I read it in your biography” I say, happy to have got a word in. “Oh yeah. The first time I went down there, someone put my back window in stole my rock box, and I went down there blazing, looking for people – when Daddy G saw me he gave me a hash cookie and told me to chill out! True story – I went to a house party and he was like: ‘Jack! Jack! You gotta leave it Jack, it’s alright man, leave it Jack!’

“And I was fuming and I was there just staring people out and I thought that was the time to put all that shit behind me and just took a hash cake and thought ‘Shit!’ I ended up fucking staying down there for four days and getting a fucking window replacement. It’s true. I ended up going to a scrap yard climbing over cars looking for a Rover 3.5 back window.”

One element that helped crews in Bristol was the sense of community in the city’s scene. There wasn’t the competition in places like London, or New York, so crews like FBI, who were highly respected musically, would be viewed in a friendly way by the Wild Bunch. Milo has remembered how while in New York people compete like “crabs in a barrel” – in this sense Bristol was a lot more organic. An example is when FBI were playing a set on York road in 85/86. The Wild Bunch were in attendance so DJ Paul Smart felt some pressure – he decided to mix two copies of Paul Revere by the Beastie Boys together and 3D [Robert Del Naja – now of Massive Attack] got on the mic and started flowing: “I think that was some kind of acknowledgement that we were up to scratch, and we still get on well to this day” – he told writers Chris Burton and Gary Thompson.  

That’s not to say that on the professional level, crews indulged in some playful rivalry: UD4, a crew that included Roni Size’s brother, ‘The General’, were once battling a crew with the misfortune to call themselves The Juice. Things looked tight until the final moments, when ‘The General’ slew the rival posse by cutting up early UK MC Derek B’s We Got The Juice.

Reports conflict as to the killer, the party of 1980s Bristol – the Red House jam. The Wild Bunch were to clash with the first UK rap crew Newtrament,[Bertram to his friends] and his weighty crew of breakers and graffers from Ladbroke Grove. Beezer remember a “massive disused Georgian house with 500 people in it in St Paul’s” All John Stapleton remembers is “that it was very difficult to get a drink” – he had played a couple of gigs earlier in the same venue and was a bit sniffy at the Bunch blowing the venue’s cover. Milo, now living in New York, paints me a more convincing picture: “It was a risky but incredible party. [Daddy] G told me about this disused wharehouse not far away from the camp just off of Portman Square. We went over there knocked the lock off and went inside. It was pretty big but a real mess, rubbish all over the place. We went to work and spent a few days cleaning the place up. We expected a few 100 people to turn up, but I don’t have a clue how many people came through them doors that night. It was ridiculous. All I know is that that place was packed all night until the sun came up – People hanging off of the speaker stacks because there wasn’t any more room on the floor.

“The cops came through at about 1am – they came up the top of the stairs saw how many people were in there and just walked away in shock. There was no way in hell they were trying to shut that thing down. The St Paul’s riots would have been like a tea party in comparison.  There were so many heads making money selling herb that a riot would have been guaranteed.

“Newtra brought down the Ladbroke grove breakers and Rappers Drew, Kev and Freshski – there was nothing we could have bought to battle Newtra, to be real about it .That man had such incredible tunes, probably the best hip hop collection outside of the US, and we were just in awe of his collection. We were just blessed to be able to hear his stuff on our set.”

He remembers another party which was to form the basis of the beginnings of Soul II Soul. After a massive fight erupted, Nellee Hooper went outside to avoid trouble and got talking to Jazzie B over a spliff, forming the building block of the first global sound system. Milo remembers things less sentimentally: “That was a party up near Seven Sisters road. All I know is that we were on our guard all day long [as it was a dodgy area]. I can’t remember who we played against that night…We had our decks set up so that we were facing each other, going through the same system. What was funny was that we were rocking this crews crowd big time in their manor and I caught one of the other crew undoing the phono cables to one of our turntables!” 

The importance of Bristolian Mark Stewart in making the Wild Bunch cannot be overstated – most famous for The Pop Group, he brought in the punk influence that also features strongly in the Wild Bunch’s music. Milo acknowledges that he wouldn’t have got as far as he did without Stewart, who hooked them up with Adrian Sherwood, Viv Goldman and The Slits. As John Stapleton remembers: “Mark was a highly interesting guy. He was the kind of guy you could have a fascinating conversation with, without quite realising quite how you’d arrived from the start to the end of your chat.”                    
Looking at the scene as a whole, one story seems to explain an important aspect of rap psychology  – the UD4 crew remember playing a gig at a university halls of residence, with a make-shift table holding up the decks – and the rapper so ashamed to be actually rapping that he hid underneath the table.

To imagine the scene back then requires a back-bending effort in readjustment. Photos of Milo at the Dug Out, wearing clothes that would look totally contemporary now, remind us that these guys were like time travellers – their clothes at the Dug Out, those camo trousers, that ammo belt, make them seem like superimposed figures tacked onto an old street scene. It’s easy to nod along to tales of how the first set of Technics were ‘like the first telephone in the village’ without realising that the contiguous lines of music culture that we are exposed to today – Music of Black Origin – simply didn’t exist for most people.

The current, rather opportunistic re-excavation of tentative black forays into musical expression in this country from the 1960s on might seem original now, but imagine getting down with the sound when black music was confined to the Blue Point [Blaupunkt record player – where the term ‘blues party’ derives], or before the first hip hop video was ever shot in ‘81. That’s just what the Wild Bunch did.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/08/15/england-riots-opinions-from-the-music-scene/

Black culture’s most potent ambassador in the UK is its music. Through the week of the rioting I’ve noticed a fear in the black people I have spoken to, and an irrational fear spreading in the opposite direction, as a result of the riots and their coverage. A visit to some of the rioting in Hackney Central on the Monday of the riots assured me that – although the violence was exteme – those involved were indeed a mix of races, contrary to some reporting. The aim was to hear from some of the strongest figures in the community and create a sense of balance amidst the white middle class comment doing the rounds. Although some of the people approached seemed offended at being asked, the overall aim was to create a positive message.

Lloyd Bradley, music journalist for The Guardian and MOJO, and author of perhaps the world’s most respected history of reggae, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King

One thing that I’m upset about, and so are a lot of people I know, is the way this was pitched as a black event, which is ridiculous. If you look at the front of the papers, most of the images are of black people, and you think: ‘this is a black event’

I’m finding that quite offensive. I watched Darcus Howe on Newsnight last Monday night, and thought it was atrocious. They seemed to have got him on there to say ‘this is a black problem’, and seeing as Darcus’s head is stuck in 1977, he expounded this and made out it was the blacks against the police. I found myself agreeing with Edwina Currie. And that sort of thing can’t be healthy.

Mad Professor – famously remixed Massive Attack’s album with his No Protection album. The Guyana-born musician who became the most prolific and respected dub producer in the UK

When you become a Londoner, you lose your ethnicity. My next door neighbour [in south London] is Indian, another is Iranian. It took New York decades before they get that kind of integration. As a musician, I expected this riot months ago. With the case of Smiley Culture, [the reggae artist whose death in March of this year after police arrived at his home with a search warrant sparked anger in London’s black community and is being investigated by the IPCC] no one has taken any notice of. There were a lot of questions around his death and it’s been brushed under the carpet.

Kano, who alongside Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder and Chipmunk is one of the UK grime artists to have translated his music into a mainstream success story

I understand the anger and frustration coming from the Tottenham community and young people all over the country. We all have questions that need answering. I want to know why Mark Duggan was shot and not arrested. Now, these young people are distracting the attention away from the shooting. Setting fire to a police car is going too far, but I get it, there is anger towards the police. Burning down and burgling local businesses? Come on. Last week a Sony building was burned down and I, along with many others, lost all the stock that I keep there. We need to do ourselves a favour: not act exactly like the stereotype the media already paint of us.

Brinsley Forde, ex-lead singer of Aswad, the UK’s most prominent reggae band. Forde also starred in the cult film Babylon, which depicted the trials and racial tribulations suffered by a young black musician growing up in south London in 1980

The spark was of course the reaction to Mark Duggan’s death. This was real – this was a reaction to a young man’s life being taken and protesters rightly demanding answers.

Brixton saw the least disturbance in the days of the riots, yet the police choose to invite the news cameras to show black youths of the area being arrested, so the country jumps to their stereotypical opinions that the black youth of under-privileged ghettos are the enemy.

Britain’s largest gang is the Metropolitan Police Force who when opportunity arose may or may not have lined its own pockets [through News International] just like the youths we’ve seen – taking the opportunity that was presented to them.

DELS, a young rapper and labelmate of Roots Manuva [Ninja Tune / Big Dada] whose new album features contributions from Roots Manuva and Hot Chip. He is also a youth worker

My concern is as not just a youth worker, but also as a young mixed-heritage man living in Britain. What now? I’m afraid that the repercussions of this will only serve to damage the perception of black youths in Britain today and their already troubled relationship with the police. Inevitably, young black people will be demonised in the media as a result of this – which would be a shame because what we may see now is a moral panic that will punish young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who were not involved in the riots.

Elijah, from Rinse FM and part  of grime music’s most influential DJ collective, Elijah & Skilliam

The rioting’ll continue in whatever form – whether it’s looting, whether it’s breaking up football matches. Policing is not the solution. Shooting rubber bullets at people won’t do anything ’cause the same problems are gonna be there.

Is it because of the negative headlines about the economy? My sister’s sitting here – do you know anything about the economy? People I know don’t know about that. A lot of the people I know that are graduates like me are now working in retail – that’s not what they expected. But the people that were out in the street? It doesn’t add up – they’re just going out to get a free pair of trainers.

I remember being 18 and having nothing to do – but I didn’t do that.

Orpheus, Sartre and Malcolm X – nothing seemed to make sense. But the trail always led back to Ishmael Butler. A sample from one of his albums in ’93, “Samba de Orpheus” by Grant Green; a snippet in an old Washington Post interview where he names Sartre as an influence; a faded photograph in his old flat in Brooklyn, his father posing with a shotgun in front of a poster of Malcolm X. I ask him, therefore if he’s heard of a quote by that guy Sartre, now that we’re talking about Africanism, the hark back to Africa of the disapora: “The untiring descent of the black man into himself reminds me of Orpheus descending into hell to rescue Eurydice.” He hasn’t. “Could you repeat it? Maybe I haven’t understood it properly. Are you saying…that Africa is hell?” There is an awkward silence. I make my excuses and ring off.

Ish Butler, or Palaceer Lazaro, as he is known now, won a Grammy and a Gold certificate in the early 1990s with his previous rap group, the boho, post-Native Tongues Digable Planets. In the last two years he reincarnated himself as part of the close-rhyming, densely-instrumented avant-rap collective, Shabazz Palaces. The first rap signatory to label Sub Pop [[The Shins, Foals, Fleet Foxes], the group has been welcomed by US broadsheets as the serious, most cutting-edge face of this movement, which has been kick-started by the posture and playground language of rappers Tyler the Creator [Odd Future] and Lil B.

He devotes parts of the collective’s first album, Black Up, to attacking the ideals of Hot 97 FM-aired mainstream hip hop – over frothing un-choked cymbals and his signature plumbing bass he hisses at them: ‘I can’t believe we drove this far / and this is who you really are / It cut but it won’t leave a scar…The glimmer of this beach house cliché rap’s getting soft.’ Invective is delivered less hiss-pitch, more in the nasal purr that Digable Planets fans became to accustomed to from their main MC.

Ish is hanging out in his flat in Seattle when we speak watching the first week of Wimbledon. He explains his exasperation at the aspirations of the mainstream as follows: “If you’re making a rap song, which is a culturally African American thing, and you’re speaking about our cultural characteristics and you’re not doing that in a unique way – then that’s usury and I don’t respect that. What I’m talking about with those lyrics [‘All the priceless things that you sold...fiending after white things’] are the aspirations [amongst generic hip hop artists] – ok now you’re rich, and you take your kids to this and this schools, in this neighbourhood – I think you should continue in your own culture. Progress shouldn’t be measured by what another [white] culture is doing – ‘cause then you acquiesce to the fact that they’re better.”

On one of the classic tracks of the album, “Youlogy” Ish raps ‘caked up in fake blood’ over effects like rapid trauma ripples of a Han folk ballad from the East, over deep interment organs from a charcoal id. This is leavened with grainy jazz brass, while Ish raps: ‘Nothing gonna stop it if it’s bound to turn a profit / ‘for this I let you do it, for this I let you watch it’.’ The song then separates into a stream of one-punch statements, with the dreary organs returning: ‘Things are looking blacker, but black is looking whiter.’

On the subject of black-white cultural paradigms, he continues – talking to me in a loose, retrospectively evasive way: “You see it with language – like a cat will come to a place – and he’ll be at a meeting, and some white people will be there, maybe they’ll be executives – and he [the black guy] will say ‘Hey, I’m chillin’, how you doin’, how you livin’?’ And people will say ‘Hey! You don’t wanna talk like that in this setting!’ And why not? Who’s to say that this is not the correct way of doing things? It’s not being anti-white or anti-white culture – it’s just being realistic about what I think life should be about, that’s all.”

Jazz litters Ish’s influences; he tells me he likes Miles Davis, particularly in his Bitches Brew, Live-Evil years, when he was accompanied by Mal Waldron, Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane. As a rapper in the Digable Planets he would ascribe himself a jazz moniker, alongside the rest of the group – he was Clifford Brown on trumpet, another was Sonny Rollins on tenor and another was Eric Dolphy on flute. Jazz is still a big part of his sound with Shabazz Palaces – on the track entitled “Endeavours for never (the last time we spoke you said you were not here. I saw you though” he incorporates five-note brass sequences, with the aforementioned riding cymbals in “Yeah You”. Ish has professed a liking for poet Robert Frost’s colloquialisms; he tells me: “To me poetry doesn’t have any form – or any science to it – people are inventing new ways of transmitting language every day. It’s as legitimate and exactly the same as any poetry – and rappers reach that level a lot.” It was Frost, alongside the other ‘signs’ I read along the way into Ish’s past, that led me to ask him about that Sartre quote. I wish I never had.

King Jammy – The Evolution Of Dub Vol.6 – Was Prince Jammy An Astronaut?

King Jammy is at the root of dub and dancehall culture, so we thought it only right to catch a couple of words with him direct from JA on the advent of his new Evolution of Dub album. The memory in question is his soundclash against Black Scorpio in Kingston 11, on February 23 1985, where he slew his rival with ’Sleng Teng’, the first fully electronic song in Jamaican history.

“The first time I play that tune at that dance it was like a smash. It was such a new song that the whole place in uproar – we had to play it 16-20 times more, for all the people bawlin’ ‘forward’ [rewind]. It was their first experience of the electronic sound.”

The album features artists that have been key in Jammy’s progression as an artist – he programmed his first riddim for Black Uhuru, and does them justice in the CD he devotes to them: ‘Natural Mystic’, his first own label release, is a stand out, featuring quavering horns overlaying the famous refrain with spare shards of Michael Rose’s vocal.

The Johnny Osbourne CD has a more rootsy feel, with some freer Nyabinghi drumming making up for an absence of vocals.The Kamikazi disc is by far the strongest – it features Sly & Robbie sessioning and riddims from some heyday gems – see Shaolin Temple. Killer track is Fists of Fury, a morose spiritual beauty that builds into a drawbar organ climax in the final seconds.

8/10

Dig it – dig deeper: Bobby Digital, Georgie Phang, King Tubby