Motivator and myself will be playing in our usual Gingermaican style: jaunty ska, slack dancehall, mongy dub and unconscious reggae.

Join us!

Click here to see the slightly bonkers flyer the Jakey chaps have made.

[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

Alien communiqué? The ghost of Delia Derbyshire? Numbers station intrusion? Cock-up at Broadcasting House?

I dunno, but it sounds good.

Update: Mike D points out in the comments that an Ask Metafilter user was wondering about the squeaks too.

Earlier in the week, the three main fansites—Housequake.com, Prince.org and Prince Fams—joined forces under the banner of Prince Fans United to fight off threats from Prince’s legal team, which had forced the three sites to remove all images of Prince from their servers.

Sue this, Prince!

Prince’s response? He released a song, PFUnk, on a piss-take site, Prince Fams United.

And now, Prince has issued a rather slippery statement, claiming he was only really miffed about some live shots from the o2 Arena gigs, not every last image of him on every last fansite after all, and that, by barraging them with legal action, he’s actually ‘looking to provide fans with exclusive music… free of charge’.

I assume that’s a reference to PFUnk, a song that includes lyrics like ‘Hush yo mouth’ and ‘You might not like the taste, but I’ma stick your face in this funk’, and so, reasonably enough, has generally been interpreted as the little man saying, ‘Cock off, you whingeing twerps, I’ll do what I like’ to the people who pay his wages.

That’s right, in a flurry of silly noms de tune, Worries In The Dance is back!

Dunno what La Motivator plans to play, but I’ve picked out a fair bit of non-boring dubstep (it exists, I swear!) a substantial portion of house (acid and mauve, mostly), a sturdy dose of rockabilly and a piquant soupçon of ‘challenging’ Wire-reader toss to go along with our standard Gingermaican blend of mongy dub, unconscious reggae and half-witted dancehall.

See you there?

Prince is launching his new Planet Earth album as a free giveaway with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread condemnation from music retailers.

The 10-track CD will be available free with an “imminent” edition of the newspaper. Planet Earth will then go on sale on July 24.

However it’s being distributed, I’m sort of faintly excited about the record. The new single, Guitar is decent-ish, in that it has wonderfully silly lyrics, and reminds me of Girls & Boys a bit.

You can listen to it by clicking the ‘play’ button below, or—more free stuff!—download it from 02.

[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

I’m not surprised: it’s a profile of Mr. Rainford Hugh Perry, AKA Lee “Scratch” Perry, AKA Pipecock Jackson, AKA The Upsetter.

Since I’ve given up trying to bypass the Black Ark obeah, here’s a few quotes plucked from the interview:

Perry on Reggae:

When you see a rainbow in the sky I tell you that is truly the sign of the Ark of the Covenant. I bring the Ark out of Egypt, down to 5 Cardiff Crescent, Washington Gardens. No-one in Kingston, Jamaica, noticed it was out of Egypt, so I give them reggae music, the treasure of King Tut. The dreadlocks around me, them poor people, so them make poor reggae. When I was a dread, I was an actor, a dead-dread. Now I am alive as a doctor, and I represent God, and God is not a Rasta. If I returned to reggae, I would be totally stupid, it would be goin’ against the signs—all the tapes I had were taken by some thieves. All Bob Marley, all Upsetter. I cannot return to that Ark and that reggae.

Perry on Duke Reid, and becoming The Upsetter:

I go to Kingston to do it with Duke Reid and all of them, but I have a song and a style they did not like. And then Coxsone Dodd have a good spirit and him want a good friend around, so him havin’ me around for a good friend in the business. But soon I could take no more of him either, and decided to make People Funny Boy, because people funny, you know? It was then I expose myself as The Upsetter. The Upsetter was my first name after I got called ‘Scratch’ at dances for my style. It means to upset all thief, all liar, all pimp, all user and all abuser and let them feel shame. The Upsetter represents the word Excalibur - blazin’ fire!

Perry on the purity of machines:

I returned to music through machines. The difference is that the machines are clean, and the machines are not corrupted. What I create here cannot hurt people, but you can bring an impure musician to play in your studio and create your own doom. My brain represent the bass, an’ if an evil man is playing on my brain, it’ll cause me trouble as he’s trying to chip away at my brain. And if an evil drummer is playing my beat with an evil thought, I think he can hurt my brain by playing a dreadful drum. But the machine cannot play a dreadful drum, and the machine cannot play a dreadful bass.

Perry on his intended audience:

The music I am playing now is strictly for the children. It is a magical technological cartoon pop music to cheer them up, to heal their brain from boring reggae. God give me a chance to recreate the children brain. The children must not be bored, or they will become criminals.

Perry on the IMF:

I am the head of the IMF now also. I am the future children’s billionaire. Look at my name, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. The L is for the English pound, the S is for the dollars, the P is for the permit out of Egypt. I am the International Monetary Fund master. I have known this a long time now.

Perry on Rastafarianism:

The colours of rain don’t belong to the Rasta, they belong to the rain. Put some water in a glass right now!¹ Hold it up against the wall: it form and show you a rainbow. You will see no dread in there. Hold it up against the wall! You see red, gold and green? You sure as hell don’t see a Rasta in there, surely not!

Perry on his divine origins:

My music represent God. And there is only one house on this earth that represent God, and that is my house. The house of Neptune, the true an’ living god. Merlin, the magic master, he give me the music sword named Excalibur. I am an extra-terrestrial, not from another planet but from heaven. My real name is Rainford Hugh Perry. And in the beginning there was the word ‘rain’. The word ‘rain’ take unto himself flesh and blood and become a living soul. I am a living soul. My name is R-A-I-N-ford. Do you understand?

I’m pretty sure that I still have the MiniDisc on which this interview was recorded—it also includes Perry singing Sun Is Shining (a song he wrote for Bob Marley, or claims to have done)—and if I can find it, I’ll post MP3s of the quotes above.

Also, it should be noted that Perry is nowhere near as crazy as he sounds—when not ‘on’, he’s basically the same as your Grandad. Only really, really stoned and wearing a hat covered in mirrors.

1. At this point, Perry refused to speak until I went to kitchen, filled a glass of water, held it up to the light, and verified that it didn’t contain a Rasta.↩

Neilson, Youngs & Kneale on Vimeo

Heavy, eh?

Neilson & Youngs were the highlight of a great Volcanic Tongue night, which also featured Kneale playing a weirdly rave-ish set, and Opaque doing their ‘masked highwaymen of feedback drone’ thing. The latter, excellent as usual, look dangerously like a supergroup nowadays—formerly a two-piece, members now include Nackt Insekten, Noma and frontperson/Kovorox label-founder Kylie Minoise (not their real names).

Also of note: inspired by a bloke in the crowd who stank like an old whore’s duvet, Guy, Len, Dave Clark and myself formulated a new entertainment concept, drawing on the immersive, often distressing, qualities of noise, but limited to olfactory sensation. We call it nase.

(There’s lots more Stevie Ray Vaughn on YouTube, too.)

Video the second, for the attention of all. There is, horrifyingly, a cat that sings the blues at the end of this clip:

Apologies for more video: despite initial resistance, I’m now as hooked on YouTube as everyone else.

Terri is an ‘outsider’ musician. Or, to put it another way, she writes naive-but-brilliant pop songs then performs them in a sub-karaoke style so jaw-droppingly bad that it beggars belief.

Interestingly, Terri’s work is conceived as a multimedia package—she first came to the attention of citizens of her hometown of Chicago by selling VHS tapes of her performances while she worked as a limousine driver—and, like her delivery, these promos are spectacularly inept.

So, what raises Terri’s work above the level of the plain old shite? Her nonchalance. Jan Terri knows that she is a great songwriter, Jan Terri knows that she is an attractive woman, Jan Terri knows that by rights she should be topping the pop charts. That few of these things are true matters not: Terri’s self-belief is contagious because she happily goes about her business, putting almost no effort into her performances, so sure is she that the mantle of greatness is upon her.

Here is Jan Terri’s best song, and best video, in my view, Losing You. I’m particularly fond of the literal visual interpretation of the lyrics. And the fact that she looks like a black pudding in those leathers.

By way of contrast, here is Get Down Goblin, a Hammer horror inspired Halloween song. At first viewing I worried that the relatively high production values of this piece diluted Terri’s appeal, but the moment roughly halfway through when she appears to forget that she is being filmed is so charming that I came around. Also, the scene in which Terri mimes an organ solo on a piano is, perhaps, an image that speaks more eloquently of Terri’s genius than words ever could.

See also: Baby Blues a love song which is, quite frankly, deeply terrifying, and perhaps the equal of Losing You (note that the blue-eyed subject of the song is played by a man with brown eyes). And finally, there is Little Brother, which both daringly appropriates Frere Jaques and features a nod to the Shangri-Las with its spoken introduction. Terri also released an album, High Risk, but, sadly, I can find no trace of it on the web.

Update: it has been brought to my attention that Jan Terri’s genius has been brought to the attention of the head of a major record label, and that a certain lupine pop star may have plans to cover Get Down Goblin—the Jan Terri revival starts here?

It’s on this Friday, the 9th, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. 9pm—late. Free in.

The music will be, as always, Gingermaican.