Category Archives: Reggae

Cosmos and reggae make Saturday night alright

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Big thanks to Debby H for sending us a great picture today (above) of possibly the last cosmos of the year in her garden. She said, “If the weather brightens up later on, I will go out and deadhead them, then maybe they will keep on flowering.” Great stuff! We hope they do keep flowering.

Now we love the cosmos, we can’t stop seeing them about. Here’s one spotted on our early morning travels in SE23 this week, they’re a bit blurred but you’ll get the gist.

And a few doors down we saw a nice raised (vegetable) bed with some trellis used as a squirrel, pigeon and general pest deterrent, what a clever idea.

And from gardening we move onto the subject of music which goes hand in hand here on Weeds. We heard Skinshape x Horus – N’Téro (feat. Modou Toure) on last week’s Ross Allen NTS show here and it’s a lovely slice of reggae! Catchy as anything too.

 

Here’s a nice bit of dub called Order Dub for a Saturday night off the Self-Titled EP from Nadia McAnuff & The Ligerians from SoulNurse Records out of Tours, France from the golden year of 2022. It’s a subtle bit of mixing but lots going on if that makes sense.

 

And we just found by pure chance now on Bandcamp a do over of a version of Dennis Walks‘ Heat Don’t Leap by the one and only Gregory Isaacs called Gone is the Love from a good few years ago. Great tune!

And funny enough there was a few cuts of the original “Heart Don’t Leap” and more great tunes on On The Wire the other week. Listen in here!

Do you reckon the weather will hold out for gardening tomorrow? It was perfect here this morning and afternoon. Fingers crossed!

Guy Fawkes loved the reggae, loved the reggae

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On this Guys Fawkes night, a big shout goes out to our good friend Marc B for sending us the musical recommendation above, an NTS show from Dan Jagger Ball on Mixcloud. There’s some wonderful stuff on it including the first tune from the great Roy Shirley with the wonderful Music is the key on the Amalgamated label here.

On hearing Roy Shirley, we remembered a TV show in the Aquarius series from 1976 about British reggae (below) which we taped thanks to Max Betamax when it was reshown in the mid 1980’s. The great Roy Shirley is in it (with Rico on trombone) alongside other reggae greats including Aswad, The Cimarrons, Sir Coxson, Matumbi, Tito Simon, Ijahman Levi with an stripped down version of Jah Heavy Load, Geoffrey Chung, a star jumper or two and also Nicky Thomas who gives a sterling performance of What love is at 20 mins in at Chalk Farm studios (next door to The Belmont that must have seen a few reggae artists having a pint there) and ends with a clip from Count Suckle‘s legendary Q club in Paddington.

It’s a show well worth watching if you love a bit of time travelling and good music. Reggae, you can’t beat it!

Rose thorns as gramophone needles. Isn’t it?

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Thanks a million to the one and only Rhythm Doctor for playing One Deck Pete’s “Put a sock in it” mix (originally for Imaginary Station’s KTAB) 11.30 mins in on his “Mojo” It’s a mix up of some fine funk, jazzy stuff, latin, soul, ska and whathaveyou. More on the show here.

Tracklistings:
Jimmy James – Come to me Softly
Off a Jamaican 7″ single on WIRL from 1962 from the man Jimmy James as in Jimmy James and the Vagabonds “I’ll go where the music takes me” fame.

Kouta Katsutaro – Asu ha otachika
Off the wonderful set simply entitled “Kouta Katsutaro” on Death Is Not The End’s Bandcamp (here).

King Stitt/Tommy Mc Cook – Sauvitt
As sampled by One Deck & Popular on “Son of Stitt” (here) and a version of Mongo Santamaria‘s Suavito (here).

Alick Nkhata – Kalindawalo Ni Mfumu
This track is something else! A sort of Rock n Roll stomper, with some lovely harmonies and some horns courtesy of a Coventry Salvation Army brass band sound-alike and someone tinkling those ivories very skillfuly towards the end. It don’t get much better than this. On an LP called Radio Lusaka off the mighty Mississippi Records Bandcamp here.

Marty Robinson – Follow you
From a very battered Coxsone Dodd white 7″ blank and later released on his Port-O-Jam label. M (Martell/Marty) Robinson may have lived in the Coventry/Birmingham area for a bit too. More about the artist here.

(Don’t) build me up buttercup

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Big thanks to the horticultural team at Thompson & Morgan for their helpful advice following Jesse Yuen’s post the other day (here) about ongoing problems with Bermuda Buttercups (Oxalis pes-caprae*). It’s looks like a chemical weedkiller (which Jesse is not going to use) can’t rid a garden of them.

“Bermuda Buttercups are a plant that you may have to learn to garden with rather than against. Pulling up plants always leaves tiny bulbils behind that grow into new plants, it can also result in the spread of bulbils to new areas. These bulbils act as storage organs which are very persistent, lying dormant beneath cardboard or mulch for months, possibly years, so that as soon as the ground is exposed to light they re-emerge. Constant hoeing will help to deplete the bulbils, but again – it will take years for this to have any effect.”

“Even If you decide to use chemical weedkillers, timing of application is critical and you may have to do it more than once. You need to catch the plants just at the point before or on flowering. This is when the bulbils are exhausted of food whilst young bulbils are too small to survive. Not all plants will be at exactly the same stage so repeated applications for several years are required.”

Thanks again to all at Thompson & Morgan for imparting their knowledge about the plant that is giving our good dub gardening friend Jesse a headache at the moment.

*The specific epithet pes-caprae means ‘goat’s-foot’, possibly in reference to the shape of the leaf. (wikipedia)

 

 

And now the end is near

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The back garden is in a bit of a mess at the moment as we haven’t been able to go out there as much as we would have liked to of late. There’s a still a couple of things that make us smile though. This morning we saw this cosmos (above), peeking through the broken paving slabs at the back of the pond after our “throw them everywhere” sowing experiments earlier this year.

The echinacea we got from B&Q (above) is still making a stand and hopefully if it don’t rot off over the winter due to the heavy soil here we’ve get more next year and the calendula (below) which was sown by the same method is great too. Do send us your end of season pictures (to one deck pete at gee mail dot com) and we’ll post them up.

 

For your Sunday listening pleasure

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Here’s a wonderful tune found while looking for music for a forthcoming shortwave mix and again it is from the ever-wonderful Mississippi Records here. From the lovely cover of the LP with a beaming Alick Nkhata behind a radio mike in a room full of records, this tune Kalindawalo Ni Mfumu has a sort of a rock n roll feel, lovely harmonies with even a brass band (it sure sounds like it) and lovely tinkering of the ivories thrown in towards the end. This tune will not fail to make you smile!

We had joy, we had fun, we had a season in the sun

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Last weekend we returned from a week away visiting some great East Sussex locations such as Camber Sands, Eastbourne and Brighton. Weather weren’t too bad (a bit of rain in the morning but usually sunny in the afternoon) but it has seemed to have changed when we got back home. Everything in the garden is now winding down, the tomatoes have their last fruit on them, the cosmos are still going (more on those later) and the giant sunflower (from seed bought off ebay) is doing great, following the sun as usual (more on that here).

We brought in the houseplants that were having a holiday outside, a chilli in a pot which will hopefully survive the winter and be back outside in the garden as they are technically perennials and even a couple of the pelargoniums taken from cuttings from the ones at the local train station. Why not? It’s nice to have a bit of the outside indoors.

Our north London correspondent Debby H has suggested we should get a page together of how people’s cosmos did this year and have a bit of a gallery going on and we think it’s a great idea. If the slugs got at your seedlings earlier on, don’t worry we will repeat it next year but any pictures of your cosmos to one deck pete (at) gee mail dot com please.

Also a massive shout and thanks to Jon Harris from the excellent multi-genre music  show called Coughing Pigeon on Brum Radio here. On the 1st August show they played Madtone Safety Council V BiggaBush‘s Lock your bike at 01.15. The show continues in the usual unusual way with all sorts of great stuff from the dubby to this wonderful tune from Christie Laume called Rouge Rouge, wonderful stuff indeed.

 

As it says on the website “You should approach every Coughing Pigeon show with a degree of both certainty and curiosity about what you will hear. Household names feature alongside the relatively unknown in a quest to create a unique listening experience” and they are right!

One for after the bins go out

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Heard on this week’s Rhythm Doctor’s Waiting Room (here), here’s a wonderful bit of classical ambience. It’s by Steven Legget & Laura Reid and it’s called Low and it’s excellent stuff and one to wind down to after the bins have been put out and you’re sitting pondering “Was it recycling and general refuse or was it just recycling tonight?”

Here’s a good refuse tip, don’t feel left out after a bank holiday. Bin collection is usually a day later so put your feet up and wait another 24 hours before dragging those bins down the drive/path knowing that you “know the (wheely bin) score”. Remember every part of the world over has a bin night. What night is yours? Do send us your pictures of your dustbins!

An Eric and Ernie bank holiday monday dub connection

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We’ve just found this tonight, a dub piece by the great Scientist & Alicia Previn called Scientist Spacewalk. Super strings dub on the answer rhythm. More on the collab here.

 

And it’s nothing to do with the strings on 1970’s UK reggae releases…

 

 

On the slow-mo trance at this time of a Saturday morning

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We can’t get enough of this tune since first hearing this. It’s released on the great Serafin Audio Imprint and as they say on the tin (labelled Bandcamp), “We are a fine little Imprint from Germany supporting slow and beautiful music all around the world” and they don’t half! This one is from Laaar and it’s called A familiar feeling and by the way, all of the EP it’s from is worth listening to!

And if you like tunes that sample shortwave radio like we do, here’s one by Hali Palombo called Contestia using a vocal sample off the Shannon Volmet, more about what a Volmet is here.