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Best Sellers moves to the Bahamian island of New Providence where rum mixes freely with rumination and young people elevated to the hot heady heights of ‘pop’ success let their ambitions … and desires … run free.
WE LIVED on … Doritos nacho cheese flavoured tortilla chips (“The Flavour Stands Alone”), white rum, Cocktails for Two ready mixed bloody mary, rice ‘n’ peas and hot tiles. The tropical humidity gets you snappy but drowsier. The beach by day gets you sticky and sandy, matted but meditative.
Dive straight into the swampy depths of a local banana dacquiri (correct pronunciation essential) after bathing. The white rum slams up against the heat … and you’re guaranteed to wash you way back home.
“No one had been on holiday for years so when we first got here it was YIPPEE! Out in the sun … People ended up having baths in cold cream a couple of days later.”
THE TWO hour flight from the bohemian islands of New York to the Bahamian island of New Providence was a breeze; excepting that it afforded my only on-holiday brush in six flights with an American airwolf – the true-to-caricature middle-American tourist beast.
A diminutive wife peered over the cusp of her husband’s seatbelt buckle to ask me: “Were you at The Wedding?”
Once in three weeks isn’t so bad, I suppose.
“No, for some reason we weren’t invited,” I replied in a brave attempt at pre-emptive humour. It failed to cross the Atlantic.
“You weren’t? Awwwww…”
Later, over breakfast, the husband is leaning over mine in an unnecessary move to reach the ears of a peer. The peer is well into his second midday J&B – on-the-rocks – when my left hand man starts itching something philosophical. “This age we live in …” he beams.
The exclamation marks prang about cabinspace as he gesticulates beatifically around our 20th century creature comforts. The peer launches a baffled brow back towards us. “What’s that you said? These eggs, wur havin’?”
Eventually they both get on board the same tangent and my bar stool sociologist concludes his declamation. “Jus’ think what they had to put up with somewhere like the 15th century HU HU HU HU!”
I was. Oh, I was. What you had to put up with in the 15th century, if you happened to be lounging about in the vicinity of the Bahamas minding your own business, was the like of Christopher Columbus and his God-backed beach parties. What you had to face up to was how ‘savage’ you were – according, that is, to the tenets and tests of the enlightened European rationalism explorers such as Columbus represented. For example, it was obvious how ‘uncivilised’ you were since you did not sport a beard. Fact!
Columbus checked into the Bahamas round about 1492. The first footprint on the beach, however, belonged to some Arawak Indian from South America who’d arrived in a canoe some 600 years earlier. The two main immigrant tribes were the Lucayans and the Caribs. The latter inspired our words for cannibal and barbeque – just two of the 16 Arawak words we use today – whilst the Lucayans were a touch more laid back – into hammocks, tobacco, no recourse to weaponry aside from the occasional toot through a conch shell.
Anyway, civilisation shackled up the Arawaks from islands everywhere and chartered them off to die in South American mines. Civilisation has a way of doing this sort of thing for peoples quite content with centuries of the same stuff they’d always been into.
Bahama comes from the Spanish Bajamar, or shallow.
Those Arawaks must’ve wondered why Columbus clanked when he walked.
Few know it, but pineapples were first produced commercially in the Bahamas.
How do I know it? I learn all these things in a handy guide purchased in a funky Nassau bookstore. My companion opts for a Socialist Party of Bahamas history inversion, but I stick where things are still authorised.
Discovery Of A Nation by Michael A. Symonette. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: “This is a non-history of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas,” remarks the author Michael A Symonette … His book is a twinkle-eyed guide to 500 years of Bahamian history. A bachelor, he lists his hobbies as golfing, cooking and writing. I learn also that the Bahamas are at present presided over by a Progressive Liberal government. In fact, Michael A has the Prime Minister doing his Foreward for him – a guy who goes by the name of Lynden O.Pindling.
Wouldn’t you smile a lot more if you lived in a place where the sun shone a lot and the person to blame for anything had a name like that?
CHRIS BLACKWELL, if I follow my Symonette correctly, is what is called “a Bay Street Boy” (or something like it). “You cannot become a ‘Bay Street Boy’. You are born one – of an old colonial family with money and political power,” says Sym, who is one himself.
Chris Blackwell is head of Island Records, his father the other half of something on your pickle jar which runs Crosse & … I don’t know about political power but Blackwell Jnr owns and runs a nice piece of property in present day New Providence. Blackwell’s three year old Compass Point studios are about 15 miles from Nassau, five miles from the island’s airport, and sit on a stretch of sand called Love Beach – an unfortunate enough name even before it was immortalised in an ELP album title a few years ago.
An Island leaflet about the studios doesn’t beat about the bush, citing the “unquestionable political stability and … tax concessions” the Bahamas offer. These factors have made them an “important financial and banking centre”… and, well, a nice place to record, once you’ve left scruffy, scuffling days behind.
Although visited and utilised by a great many people, Compass Point is probably best known as something of an island acts commune-cum-playpen encompassing the work or whims (depending on whether one likes it or not) of Grace Jones, Robert Palmer, Tom Tom Club, Sly ‘n’ Robbie ‘n’ various supersessioneer chums, plus satellite acts like The B-52s and Plastics, plus producers and engineers like Blackwell himself and Alex Sadkin (co-producers of the last two Grace LPs), young whizz-kid Steven Stanley and recent recruit Paul (son of Jerry) Wexler.
A recent LP whose title showed even less imagination than that ELP is ‘Compass Points’ by Desmond Dekker recorded guess where, produced by Robert Palmer and released on Stiff. If you’re wondering why …
… I haven’t mentioned Claude Levi Strauss so far, it’s because I opted for the human interest intro and saved this quote from his Tristes Tropiques (not so much my holiday reading as temporary unconscious) until now: “Exploration is not so much a covering of surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape or a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning.”
I BUMP into Madness in studio B on a guided tour of Compass Point, which pretty much adds up to studio A through a corridor to … be introduced to Madness.
Madness: what a mass! Mass: what a madness!
Madness have been recording their third LP in Compass Point for three weeks before I intrude. One week to go. For this expection, the Madness community numbers between 15 and 20, including family and friends. Faces are gradually named for my benefit, but in the waves of tropical heat and similar haircuts it’s difficult, especially for a memory worryingly less agile than it used to be.
I know the signs of Suggs and suspect that that is Chas (so why do they call him Carl?), and I know Woody who is married to Jane and I recognise Clive Langer over the mixing desk who names co-producer Alan Winstanley (the same two that produced the other two Madness LPs), but that still leaves a lot. Of that lot it is bass player Mark, his omnipresent grin and unruffled air that put me most at ease. He is also the perfect group tension compliment to the other – manic – extreme of Carl Smash.
One hour CS is to be found slumped and surly, disengaged from communal banter, TV-dozing, cradling a bit of his trumpet … and a bit later you’d swear speeding – in this neck of the woods, where from you bugger? - the night away, had you not been briefed by someone quiescent with his wild biorhythmic fluctuations. A little hurricane, that Chas Smith.
“We’re getting away from the mellow sound again!”
So I tag. Invited over for cups of tea and bits of TV (a comfort meeting such nice folk so far from home). I sit down and slump along and watch the grounding down and sounding in of a third time out. I calculate casual entrances. I explore areas which would for me otherwise surely remain barren of meaning. I answer questions about, mainly, riots and chart positions. I just jot a lot, mainly.
“It’s no different than any other studio. People just come here for tax reasons…”
The acquisition of knowledge is hindered by my own self-absorbed shyness, the terrible temptations imposed by the skyline, a working atmosphere which suggests social conversation rather than QUESTION and ANSWER – and the fact that the Mass ive community is working, or waiting to, and that one turns imperceptibly and exhaustingly into the other. This is especially true for the two producers: there’s rarely more than one musical member of Madness required at a time – such is the modern recording process – whereas Langer and Winstanley are shackled to the full 12 hour stretch and hardly get to see let alone indulge a sun soaked day.
I’M STARING at an aerosol can of Sudden Beauty hair-spray, Superhold New Formula. Most of what I hear is Lee Thompson pressing saxophone into already completed instrumental stretches of new Madness tracks.
A seat squeaks and a saxophone squeals.
They keep going round in circles, round, tracking down right moments and coincidental mixtures, looking for better treasures, trying to construct a more meaningful leisure music. Things are gotten tighter, taped together tight as a dream. Sections are played and played, played and played around with. It’s a nerve tiring process. It’s surface flaying. It’s play working. It’s taxing. It’s hard tact.
“It sounds as if the sax is out of tune, maybe …”
“My saxophone’s been out of tune ever since ‘One Step Beyond’!”
Lee wheels away a massive baritone on a tiny trolley; it looks like a piece of archaic deep sea diving equipment. Out comes the tenor for the afternoon. Another adjustment (croak) another chord (boop) ruptures the surface and withdraws rudely. He is working on one solo split down into three 20 secondish sections (speed it up) each of which will take upwards of 20 minutes (calm down) to get just so.
Contortion (after) contortion. It’s like a lush Junior Walker nightstroll with a white cane taking the cues (I mean, sorry) time after time after that. One section (and again) especially niggles. It takes an inordinate amount of time to stalk down the desired timbre. One flustered flurry after another until it’s tight! And Lee Thompson lets out a victory snarl something between elated and anguished. Played back, the split second post solo snaARGHrl sounds superb (rewind) like a spontaneous soul track first take sigh. YES. Not at all like the near-hysteria relief scream.
The saxophonist wanders round from studio to control room. I tell him his snarl sounds like he scored somebody’s winning goal.
“I’ve been trying to score THAT goal for bleedin’ hours.”
WAITING FOR some Madness to wander up and warm in, I hang in the wake of studio whizzkid Steven Stanley, who is in the process of mixing a new Hortense Ellis track for Sly ‘n’ Robbie’s Taxi label. Stanley is a young guy with light brown skin, a crowning Afro and movements that seem a little soft focused until you catch him in the mixing desk seat. For a good example of what he does there, compare his 12” remix of Grace Jones’ ‘Pull Up To The Bumper’ with the original LP version – compare the split levels and altered states, the ineluctable modal merger of dub irresponsibility and funk vertical take off, an itchy schizo skank: nag nag NAG!
This year he’s also working on the just completed Tom Tom Club LP and the soon released Ian Dury ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ LP. I don’t attempt to interfere but just try and keep track as his noticeably delicate hands go! Go! Go! Go! In a multiplicity of directions, upsetting the balance of as many functions. The gentle flicker of fingers is belied by the brutal cuts in the sound emerging from three pairs of speakers distributed round the control room. The overload of rings and bracelets on Stanley’s fingers and wrists only adds to the effect.
Sly wanders in and begins to converse with the now animated Stanley about the tics and tacks of the tune, in a syntax equal parts dense patois and an almost comical sing song scat.
“Goo goo goo goo!” urges Sly, exiting to prepare a piano.
The hi tech equipment of Compass Point is encased in enough pine casing and polished gloss for it to pass as any advert’s space age kitchen. In amongst it all, a tiny Madness amp gives up the ghost – faints or falls asleep or dies.
“Hire one from Miami like we did before,” is one suggestion.
“Like bleedin’ Habitat – good on the outside, crap inside,” is another.
Minds wander whilst places are found …
“We’re pretty big in Russia … our T-shirts go for £60!”
The tracks roll round again. The bass walks. The drums talk. Tempers behave themselves. Madness are very social workers and their work is strongly socialist – in invariably arguable or agreeably camouflaged ways. The choices and even crash courses evident on this next LP see that Madness also avoid any hint of self-parody, of sounding how people like me expected them to sound. The horns and slurred mesh of piano and organ give it a swinging, Southern soul, Allen Touissaint sound. Believe it or not!
Most of the Suggs voices I hear sound remarkably hurt - post ‘Grey Day’ Madness pop gets clammier, less chummy, and peers closer along the broken back of this ingrate Britain.
Words snap into bitter sorrow and sneer all over smoothing pleasantries. ‘Mrs. Hutchinson’ deals with National Health incompetence and national cosiness – set to a ‘callous’ chin-up knees-up jaunt. ‘Day On The Town’ is another ‘Grey Day’ but with a specifically jaundiced subject in its sketch of a lifeless London Town over run by tourists (it sounded good in Nassau: “Summer in London, watery sunshine …”) An overall anti-complacency nerve pokes through both the fractured and forlorn expressions. Caught in an immaculate funk, it’s easy to hear Dury’s better moments on ‘Do It Yourself’. The new Madness murmurs tilt just as solidly at our dirtier debts, pacts, jokes and tricks.
Madness moving on a mechanical ideological … madness (that is what this piece is about: madness, don’t you know?).
I TUMBLED OVER Madness in the cadence of the tropics. From what I heard and where I heard it, large portions of the frightening THIRD LP have unimaginable soul splendour. I keep thinking Allen Touissaint and telling people who say no! and telling myself I’m exaggerating but I’m not. Madness’ new found funk is multi-directional, with depth. It isn’t a superficial swipe: it isn’t surface attractions. It is party music with snares, so much more focused and concentrated than the two Made in Camden LPs. It makes me ponder and perspire. Deftly dislocated pop: pop dislocated deftly. (I jumble up Madness in anticipation of my deadline).
“How many drinks does it take … to put you in that tropical island mood?”
Concluding this exploration: I can speak more freely. A weight is lifted from my mind. Just one of many scales falling from its eye. And then. A drink will be placed in front of me.
“And then we’ll talk; what shall we talk about?”
- Contributed by Sean Gaskin
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