Influences: Lord Echo

I just love this, it’s so great to put on on the weekend. I just put it on repeat. I’ve had the most settled year of my adult life this year, not much travelling, not many gigs. A lot of routine! I love it. The same things happen in the same order each week! Then there’s a weekend at the end of it! I guess this is what drives people completely out of their minds eventually, but if it’s been slightly foreign to you it can be really quite comforting I think. Anyway, I love to put this on while I do my housework on the weekend and air out the house.

Who could deny this?! There’s so much to love. Most of all, I just love how loud the drum machine is mixed and how it goes into those snare drum rolls for ages. And of course, the guitar and bass work are spectacular. There’s that style of African bass that is just so unique, no body any where else in the world plays bass like that.

This is just perfect, hypnotic jazz. It sounds so mysterious. The sound of adding a delay to a whole mix bus can often give that effect, I’m not sure if this is it but it has that feeling. I love that. What is that thing in the distance there, behind the music? I’m always trying to add that kind of layer to my own music, like a psyhic backdrop that you hang all the foreground objects on.

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Lee Perry’s productions. I just think he did some incredible stuff. The mix on this is so interesting, it’s so open and empty yet it has this depth to it. Like you can see into the distance of the thing as I mentioned earlier. I really think he’s one of the best guys for that. And the vocal I find really touching, just a great performance. No one’s going to notice how incredible the drummer is, but after you start recording music you realise that the drummers on most of your favourite records are actually just freaks of nature.

I’m just nuts for the mood of this stuff. “You’re A Melody” was a big influence on me, and I’ve only recently come across a couple of other records. But I could just listen to this all day. There’s all that drama of disco, but it’s so cool and refined.

This is music I like to put on at dinner time sometimes, it always cracks my son up because it’s so incongruous. But I actually find it quite relaxing to listen to. Some of the melodies are so insanely cheery that cynicism just doesn’t quite know what to do with itself and has to go stand in the corner while you finish your dinner.

Just love this production. The sound of the drums. And the outro is just fantastic! Those super loud handclaps.The whole kind of frequency range that the song occupies I find fascinating, it’s just so very different to how music is made and mixed these days.

My friend Bek played me this after dinner one night. Sometimes we have little mini discos, someone turns the lamps on and off while the others get to dance and play percussion, or recorders. I have a lot of recorders on loan from a friend. Big ones! Bartione all the way down. Anyhow, this just blew my mind. The percussion is so great, and the punky female vocals. It’s actually the chorus line in an opera, they’re washer women doing the washing in time to this whole thing. Fantastic.

Oh boy, I had this massive infatuation with a girl recently and I went through a speight of listening to this all the time and thinking about her. I was in London when this was issued on a white label 45 and I was in Honest Johns and it came on and just blew my mind. It’s just so mysterious sounding, I love any music with some kind of element to it that you can’t quite put your finger on. Anyhow, I didn’t have much money and I could only afford to get one thing so I ended up buying ‘Modern Ethiopian Hits’, which has satisfied me for many years. But I never forgot the sound of this record and was so pleased to hear it again recently at a birthday party.

It seems like the older I get, the more I just want music that relaxes me. The thing is, you can’t so much listen to it as just have it on as you go about your business and then it makes much more sense. This is perfect for feeling slightly morose to, but I also put it on if someone comes around and I just want a bed for conversation to lie in. I always wondered if I’d have an inevitable slide into new age music, and perhaps this is the start of it. But hey, ambient music is no crime. There’s a few pieces from this artist that I have played a lot. I’d like to try my hand at some at some point. I imagine it would be like anything that sounds simple – incredibly difficult.