Allcrewsoldtightiswonsgownowtookeepitlocked.  Erm, sorry about that. Just got a bit carried away.  Just that lately I've been really getting back into the pirates.  I mean it's a bit ironic when we're meant to be going all digital and there's nothing official worth listening to.  And all of a sudden the pirates have got their act together.  So on any given day there's half a dozen outfits pumping out old school house, deep house, tribal house, rave classics, or maybe it's all new underground that sounds like something from back in the day.

And if you're really lucky there'll be someone making merry with some mental jungle and ragga messes.  I was listening mesmerised the other night for an hour or so as this manic mix of blindingly bonkers bass and beats brightened up my room. And it was great because there's not really any music that can match the rawness and riotous intent of the clatter and batter and bass. If it's back then great.

I was just smiling thinking of god it must have been '94? Yeah it must have been '94 and what was another golden age for the pirates. Stations would just come and go. But the music was out there. Jungle. Before it was anything else. This totally invigorating madness.  I never knew the songs. But the music just exploded out of the speakers and made you feel so alive. And interference seemed to be part of it. The sounds. The experience. Music encroaching from a different frequency. So the intrusion and the interruptions. The ritual. The rigmarole. Just play the music guys please. Stop chatting away over the top. Tell the MCs to shut up. Stop those sirens.

And you'd never know what song was being played. White label. DAT. Remix. Exclusive. Back after the break. The breaks. Teases. Tormentors. But did I even need to know? I was never going to buy the elusive or illusive or excluuuuusive.  And it was part of the fun of it the noise being unattainable. And a long way from the soul station the Jasmine Minks sang about half a dozen years or so before when we were listening to TKO or LWR and the rare groove, the hip hop, and especially the between the sheets selections, the quiet storm.

And if there's one song that makes me think of '94 and the sounds on the radio it has to be Dawn Penn and No No No You Don't Love Me And I Know Boy. The universal. The fantasticly supple subtle reworking. The reimagined rocksteady of Steely and Clevie which was subsequently bent out of shape and remodelled as ragga roughneck jungle jouissance with all manner of interlopers and interrupters barging in and doing their thing but never ever erasing the magic of the original. The magic that still moves everyone from Rihanna to Lily to dilly and dally and rain on its parade.

But people like Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge kept playing this absolutely amazing French reinterpretation which was just. Well it was just just. Scary. Sexy. Smoky. Made the hairs stand up on the back of your neck one moment and uncomfortably hot under the collar the next.  But I just could not catch who it was by. I tried hard. I kept hearing it.  It kept eluding me.  I wanted it so much. But life moved on.

Where I did eventually catch up wth it was on the DJ Kicks set by Daddy G where he set it in between Willie Williams' Armageddeon Time and Tricky's Aftermath in what has to be one of the most inspired pieces of programming ever. And at last I knew it was by Melaaz. I knew that much at last. At least. Though I wasn't really any the wiser.

It would be several more years before I tracked down the Melaaz set Non Non Non was featured on.  Fifty cents well spent on ebay. Fifty cents never better spent anywhere ever. At last I knew a little about Melaaz. I knew she was beautiful. I knew she was a great rapper and smoky soul singer. I knew she had worked with La Funk Mob. That they had sprinkled stardust over a stunning set of songs that mixed up hip hop, jazz, reggae, soul in a very special way, but what else for Melaaz? Where did she go? It's criminal to produce something so special and then disappear. Who let her go?

La Funk Mob. French beats. Hip hop. Trip hop. Downbeat. Electronica. Easy listening. Exotica. La Funk Mob. Yeah.  La Funk Mob.  For a while they were Mo’Wax weren’t they?  They produced the early MC Solaar stuff and other French hip hop hence I guess the link to Melaaz

It's almost possible to forget how special some of the music that came out of France then was. Then. The end of the twentieth century. How for a moment it was as cool as can be. Air. Superdiscount. Motorbass. Source Lab.  Yellow and all that. There was life beyond Daft Punk and the new French disko.  It’s interesting how it all got very housey but I was all for the down tempo arty not party stuff.

The Melaaz record is as good as anything around. And other records. It begins to come back to you.  There was a real explosion of great music from France.  Fin de siecle.  Like Ollano. I like Ollano a lot.  An awful lot. I have an LP of theirs which is amazing. The French did the trip hop with such panache. Smokier and sultrier and stranger. It's funny looking now at that record.  Because it features Marc Collin who went on to do the Nouvelle Vague project, and Bertrand Burgalat who would be hailed as the French Phil Spector and would run Tricatel records putting out things by April March and David Whitaker and Jonathan Coe and Helena Noguerra.  The very great Helena. She sang on the Ollano record so it all ties together, and you need her Azul LP.  And Xavier Jamaux was in Ollano, and he was behind Bang Bang who also did the trip hop very beautifully. 

I was just thinking about the David Whitaker Tricatel put out, and the sleevenotes that were with it by Andrew Loog Oldham where he’s talking about meeting Whitaker for the first time, and Loog has his powder blue Chevy Impala, and Lemmy Caution-ish partner, which is pretty cool and has a certain elegance, and I’m contrasting that to the Remarc compilation I’ve been playing to death, which is as rough as hell and sometimes that’s what you need when the red mist is haunting you and you want to hit out, then the subtleties and ideas don’t work, and you need the basics, the bass.

© 2007 John Carney