The Smoke
There was a lot of ersatz psychedelia about in 1967 and 68, but York’s premier – possibly only – exponents of tough, R&B-based psych sounded like they knew what they were singing about. Predating the summer of love by several months, their fantastic debut single, My Friend Jack, approvingly depicted a Timothy Leary-like LSD proselyte, while the ferocious guitar noise that spiked the track hinted at the dark, overwhelming side of the acid experience. The BBC banned it, which didn’t seem to dampen the Smoke’s enthusiasm for similar topics, as evidenced by the subsequent, self-explanatorily titled High in a Room and Have Some More Tea. Big in Germany, they finally achieved a British hit in 1981, when Boney M, of all people, covered My Friend Jack.
The Rats
In Cosey Fanni Tutti’s 2017 autobiography, Art Sex Music, she recalls being wolf-whistled as a teenager by Mick Ronson: then still a gardener in the employ of Hull council, he was already a local star on account of his looks alone. In truth, the music his late-60s band the Rats made is less interesting than what happened next – Ronson, Rats drummer Mick Woodmansey and bassist Trevor Bolder warily adopted the space-age glam look foisted on them by new frontman David Bowie and became the Spiders From Mars – but listening to them trying to navigate the shifting trends of the late 60s, from psych to hard rock, you occasionally catch a spark about Ronson’s guitar-playing.
Jab Jab
Huddersfield’s past as a reggae hotbed in 1970s Britain is a fascinating, forgotten sliver of musical history. The town was home to 30 different reggae soundsystems, West Indian clubs that were enshrined in song (Arawack Version and Venn Street Rub by Inner Minds) and one of Britain’s first interracial reggae bands: Jab Jab, formed in 1970. They gigged relentlessly, a perennial support band, but never signed a record deal: the 1970s recordings that were finally released in 2015 revealed a genuinely original fusion of reggae, funk, soul and Hendrix-style guitar and an overwhelming sense of “what if?” The death of frontman Joe Augustine in 2017 brought a brief latter-day reunion to an end.
Be Bop Deluxe
In the mid-70s, Be Bop Deluxe made music that was hard to pin down. Were they sharp-dressed, brainy glam rockers, Wakefield’s answer to Roxy Music? A prog band with a sci-fi bent and a technically dazzling guitar hero in Bill Nelson? Were they forward-thinking harbingers of new wave and synth pop? They could sound like all three, sometimes at once. Their restlessness was both the joy of Be Bop Deluxe and, perhaps, the reason they feel slightly forgotten these days. It’s hard not to think their reputation might have switched from cult to legendary status long ago had they been easier to categorize and slot into history; certainly, legendary status is what their albums deserve.
Vice Versa
At first, Sheffield took very badly to Cabaret Voltaire’s challenging brand of electronics and tape experiments – their early gigs regularly degenerated into violence. Ultimately, however, they singlehandedly spawned an idiosyncratic electronic music scene in Sheffield that continues to this day, along the way birthing everything from the Human League to dance label Warp to oddball acts including Fat Truckers and Hiem. Vice Versa were the apotheosis of a late 70s post-Cabs Sheffield electronic band – dark, lo-fi, experimental, audibly more in thrall to Throbbing Gristle than Gary Numan. The industrial bleakness of their sound is even more enthralling given that they were about to change their name to ABC, their sound to pop and their wardrobe to gold lamé.
Delta 5
The Leeds punk scene was politically fraught. At one extreme, it spawned Britain’s first openly Nazi punk bands – the Dentists and the Ventz, both sponsored by the National Front. At the other, it was home to the Mekons, Gang of Four and Delta 5. The latter are the least celebrated of the three, but their angular, feminist post-punk funk – their line-up featured two bass players – retains a strangely timeless quality. If you didn’t know their debut single Mind Your Own Business was nearly 40 years old, you could quite easily believe it was released last week; 1980’s Try sounds remarkably like a hot new release on DFA Records.
Chakk
Another Sheffield band inspired by Cabaret Voltaire, Chakk followed that band’s post-industrial path into dance music: their 1985 single You/They Say was an intriguing mix of agitated white funk and production influenced by the sound of American boogie and electro. They signed a major label deal the following year: the relationship proved difficult, but Chakk’s biggest legacy was that they used their advance to build Fon Studios, which over the next decade played host to everyone from Take That to Pulp. The affiliated Fon record shop subsequently changed its name to Warp and begat the legendary dance label.
Age of Chance
Leeds’s Age of Chance started life purveying sheet-metal guitar noise and shouted vocals about consumerism, but a jokey cover of Prince’s Kiss – inescapable on John Peel’s radio show in 1986 – set them on a different path. Like a lot of 80s attempts to fuse alternative rock, hip-hop and cut-and-paste sample mania, their debut album 1000 Years of Trouble felt incredibly bold and futuristic at the time, but shows its age today. Its follow-up, Mecca, boasted a new, soul-influenced vocalist, Charles Hutchinson, a more subtle approach and the influence of acid house, and remains something of a lost classic.
Fun-Da-Mental
Of all the artists to emerge from Bradford’s Asian community, former Southern Death Cult drummer Aki Nawaz remains the most controversial, a man who has spent his latterday career muddying the boundaries between righteous political activist, advocate for Islam and Malcolm McLaren-style provocateur-cum-self-publicist. It has meant that Fun-Da-Mental’s music often gets overlooked: the furore created by albums such as 2006’s All Is War – with its samples of Osama bin Laden and lyrics about suicide bombers – tends to obscure the often thrilling and kaleidoscopic fusion behind the lyrics, with everything from Delta blues to qawwali thrown into the mix.
