Welcome to the RPM Seven Day Soundtrack, weekending Friday 17th September 2021. Requiring a musical diversion to distract for a few hours from the troubles of the world? Look no further; over to...

John -

"Hi RPMers, This week I've chosen tracks from albums acquired in the past seven days. The first is from 'Dark Matters', the new album by The Stranglers which arrived by post on Saturday. The other two choices are from LPs I bought at the record fair in Leicester on Sunday; 'Rasta' by Benjamin Zephania and 'Harder Than The Rest' by Culture."

Philip -

"Greetings and best wishes to all RPMers as always. I haven't listened to a great deal of music this week, but it struck me that I could start this week with a version of a song that I mentioned last week."

Piers -

"Hi Folks. I am sure that you will all agree that it is often hard to choose just three tracks. I play quite a lot of music, as does Jayne. Over breakfast one morning (Tuesday) this week, amongst several other cuts, we heard these three."

"When I first heard the initial album recorded by the late Andy Palacio, and the band that he formed, ‘The Garifuna (Funk) Collective’, it was, a musical and political, revelation, to me. My reaction was similar to hearing ‘Tinariwen’, when that came out.

Astounding cross rhythms and sinuous instrumental melodies intertwined, and combined, sensuously with the equally exotic sounding lyrics. The beautiful sounding singer sang songs which bore a political message about lifting the Garifuna people from the situation that they had been placed in by politicians and corrupt international trade deals.

There follows a vaguely relevant ramble into the history of N/E South America... feel free to skip to the music!

The origins of the Garifuna community, a tiny ethnic group, of mixed Caribbean and African origin, can be traced a slave ship wrecked in the 16th Century when African survivors intermarried with indigenous people, the Miskito/Sambu.

In the 16th century the British Crown welcomed the Sambus as allies against the Spanish and one hundred years later, in 1638, the son of one of the leaders was welcomed to join the British Royal Court. (Did you ever wonder why, in the past, black people were commonly called ‘Sambos’?) But it didn’t last. (Money was to be made!)

After being “forcibly displaced by the British, in time they became just one of a number of interrelated rural tribes, which spread to inhabit the dense, shore side, jungles which span the 'Mosquito Coast' (from 'Miskito' - nothing to do with flying insects) on the borders of Belize, Nicaragua and Honduras. They now total about 400,000. Of them, the smallest ethnic group (less than 1%) are Garfina.

With a collective history of communal living, in small, isolated villages of self built homes, mainly self sufficient, reliant on fishing, and very basic, subsistence level food farming, and textile weaving, for five centuries the Garifuna have struggled. Their history has been plagued with colonial oppression, 3rd class citizenship, poverty and ethnic cleansing.

Having been marginalised by society, and driven to live in the jungles which nobody else could bother to scrape a living from, by the 1970s even that land that they occupied was being systematically stolen from them. They were under attack from aggressive government troops, and para-military agencies (in the direct pay of American farming corporations), and (indirectly US state sponsored) terror gangs. The surviving populations were being brutally ‘relocated’ to urban, shanty slums against their will, for the benefit of shareholders in tinned pineapple production.

Over 30 years ago Andy Palacio, through the medium of his ‘Punta’ music, brought their plight to the attention of the world. He was successful. Many things have changed for his people, and continue to do so even after his ‘untimely’ death in 2008.

If you check out 'Garifuna', on line, these days, it seems that the thing that they are mostly widely recognised for, culturally, is a ‘twerkish’, bum wiggling dance, often performed, whilst wearing colourful 'national Dress' for the entertainment of cruise ship passengers..

https://www.blackpast.org

But 13 years after Andy Palacio's demise and the posthumous international recognition of his musical master work 'Watina', The Garifuna Collective’ are still going strong…Still making great music."

Morra -

"Here's my three..."

Tony -

"Hope you are all enjoying this partial Indian Summer. Here are my 3 for the week."

Alan -

"Time to return to one of my favourite 'genres'.......... US 'garage rock'. When I look back at this period I'm struck by how little apparent influence the Beatles had on the US musical output during those years. There were a few bands who slavishly copied the Fab Four (notably The Knickerbockers and The Castaways), instead it's the Stones, Pretty Things and Them et al who gave thousands of 'garage dwellers' the impetus to troop along to the myriad of primitive studios which seemed to proliferate in virtually every town in the States.

First up it's quite possibly (in my 'umble opinion anywayze) the greatest double-sider from the era. Recorded at the B.A.Starr Studio in Garden City Michigan, just 75 copies were pressed for the band to try to sell. However, every time the band played they were bottled off stage and had to revert to regular name changes to try to secure further gigs. Then, disaster struck twice for the band; just before they took possession of the discs their lead singer was decapitated in a motorcycle accident and this was followed by the studio being destroyed in the '67 Chicago race riots. Luckily, studio owner Yolanda Owens had kept a safety copy and pressed a further 100 copies on her Orbit label with 75 going to the band and the rest to 'local DJ's and star makers'!!! There are just 14 copies known to have survived and, such is it's collectability, that a cracked copy was sold for $400 in 2003 whilst a playable copy was snapped up by Jack White's cousin for $2561 in 2005!!"

"More primal (or should that be primordial ?) rock, this time from the southern US, Bridgeport Texas to be exact. This track was recorded for the local Wash-Tex label at The Cross Roads Cafe in Bridgeport (allegedly utilised, according to the label boss, for its 'superior' acoustics and not just because it was free to use as it was owned by the guitarist's mother!!) and it's well outside of the usual time frame for garage rock.... 1968!! Just what were these guys thinking of?? Released on the offshoot Big Tex label, the disc gained recognition thanks to the Pebbles compilation collections and garnered covers by the Cramps and the Lemonheads in 1981 and 2009 respectively. Just 500 were pressed and, as the band rarely played more than 70 miles from home, many copies went unsold which led to the group taking the remaining copies out back for target practice! Fast forward almost 40 years and Dr Ira Padnos, founder of the Ponderosa Stomp festival, telephoned lead guitarist Les Dale and asked him to contact the rest of the band with a view to reforming for the festival. After some discussion, and many hours of rehearsals, the band returned to the stage at the 2008 Stomp with a set of sixties 'chestnuts', beefed up with a cover of Neil Youngs 'Down by the river' which was well received by the crowd who demanded an encore of this genre classic."

"And to conclude, here's a band determined to 'make it big' in LA......... the only problem being that they lived 3000 miles away in New Jersey NYC. Students Roger Kelley, Richard Ehrenberg, Jeff Hildt, and Dwight Harris decided, in Spring 1966, that the best way to fill in their summer vacation and ensure they were not drafted into the Vietnam bound US Army was to form a band and relocate to LA....... by road. Our intrepid non-musicians agreed to write and record an album of material en-route which was duly laid down in the high desert city of Albuquerque. Armed with these very basic recordings they hawked them around LA's premier labels, finally clinching a deal with the tiny KR label, set up by Koppelman-Rubin, the production company behind the Lovin’ Spoonful. A single was duly pressed up, further (re-) recordings made and several gigs arranged but all to no avail. The world just wasn't ready for the unholy mix of Mad magazine humour, horror movie effects and crude surf/early psychedelic music, and perhaps that's still the case!! Pretty soon, KR stepped in and cancelled the proposed album, their gigs quickly dried up and as a result, in late summer 1966 the band returned to NY to resume their studies."

"Stay safe everyone, thanks to all for keeping the tunes flowing and, especially, big thanks to Tim for continuing to be our guiding light!!"

Jackie -

"Binge-watched the 2nd series of Lupin this week....these songs featured in the soundtrack."

Dave -

"Hi everyone, hope you all have had a good week. My three this week are inspired by gigs I have seen at the UEA."

Jayne -

"Greetings RPM friends and I trust you are all feeling positive and well. Here are my choices for this week."

Tim -

"Hi everyone. Here are three from my week."

'Til Next Time...