La Düsseldorf were a German Krautrock band, who released three albums in their lifetime. The band, which was made up of former Kraftwerk drummer and Neu! multi-instrumentalist, Klaus Dinger, and Neu! collaborators Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe, came together after the break-up of the legendary Neu! in 1975.

This track, White Overalls, is taken from the band’s second album, Viva, released in 1978 on Teldec Records. A proto-punk sensibility had first begun to develop on Neu!’s Neu! 75 album, and White Overalls represents an interesting point in time, when Krautrock began to cross over more fully into New Wave, with washed-out synthesizer sounds combining with trademark Krautrock 4/4 Motorik rhythms. Indeed, there is an unmistakable Plastic Bertrand sound to the song, but there are also still influences from a previous era working away too – namely Roxy Music. (There seemed to be a mutual love-in at work, because Brian Eno considered the band to be influential on him). Great stuff.

Black Slate was a roots reggae band formed in 1974, including musicians from England, Jamaica, and Anguilla. Having backed Delroy Wilson and Ken Boothe on their UK tours, they had their own reggae-chart hit themselves in 1977, (teaming up with the Disco Reggae Band), with this anti-mugging song, Sticks Man. The record was a hit the Dutch and Belgian charts, (after becoming a surprising underground hit in Antwerp nightclubs). Listening to it now, you can hear the musical DNA of the soon-to-be Two Tone movement in the UK.

They toured the UK for the first time in 1978, and formed their own TCD label.  They also backed reggae legend, Dennis Brown when he played in the UK.  An album, Amigo, was released in 1980, followed by Sirens In The City in 1981, on Ensign. The band released two further albums in 1982 and 1985, but little was heard of them after that. However, a new album, World Citizen, was released in 2014 after the band reformed in 2013.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the tragic death, at 29, of Marc Bolan in a car crash. There isn’t anything that I can say about Bolan and his band T. Rex that hasn’t been already written 100,000 times, but I just wanted to pay tribute to him on this significant date, by selecting a lesser-known T.Rex song, (if there is such a thing), and sharing it. It’s a track from their 4th album, The Slider, and demonstrates how far ahead of his time Bolan was as a songwriter, arranger, and musician. It still has a freshness to it, even in 2017. I got into T.Rex relatively late in the day, when my copy of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s heavily Bolan-influenced 1988  single, Sidewalking, sparked an interest in me to get to the DNA of the track. I’ve loved T.Rex ever since, and have often wondered what Bolan might have gone on to do had he lived. T. Rex’s final two albums, Futuristic Dragon (1976) and Dandy in the Underworld (1977), are still not really like any other albums I’ve ever heard, and indicate perhaps that he could have taken rock into wildly new and uncharted territory. Sadly, we shall never know. So much potential. Only 29.

RIP #Forever29

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywFd-2q-LGM

This blog post is intended as a tribute to Grant Hart, drummer of Hüsker Dü, whose death I have just heard about. The reason I chose this song, apart from the fact that I love it, is that it showcases Hart’s fast drumming style. I probably could have chosen better examples of his musicianship, but this is the song that came to mind – it was, after all, the first song I’d ever heard by Hüsker Dü – a joyous highlight of an awful time in my life.

Born Grantzberg Hart, March 18, 1961 in St. Paul, Minnesota, in addition to being drummer of Hüsker Dü, (meaning “Do you remember?” in Danish and Norwegian), he was also a  co-songwriter. Hart formed the band in 1979 with Bob Mould and his friend, Greg Norton. The band were initially  part of the American hardcore punk movement of the early 1980s, but their song-writing ability and musicianship marked them out as different from the majority of such bands, who usually sank into obscurity after one or two singles/EPs. In 1986, Hüsker Dü became the first significant band from the American indie scene to sign with a major label, (Warner Bros.).

However, this did not herald a new period of success for the band. In fact, tensions developed in the band after this time, largely because of issues surrounding Hart’s heroin addiction, (which he never really fully recovered from), and he even accused Mould of ensuring that he could not have more than 45% of the songs on each of the band’s albums. The band broke up acrimoniously in 1987 after releasing ten albums, Hart stating that Mould’s songs had become increasingly “square.” (See Michael Azerrad’s book,  Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991). After the band’s breakup in 1988, Hart formed the alternative rock trio Nova Mob, where he moved to vocals and guitar. Hart’s solo career became his main focus after the dissolution of Nova Mob in 1997.

There is a forthcoming 3-disc release of Hüsker Dü’ s earliest material, entitled Savage Young Du, which shows what prolific songwriters Hart and Mould were, and how influential they were on the American underground music scene in the 1990s. Indeed, the Chicago Tribune say that the band, “cast a wide shadow over American rock of the ’80s and ’90s and beyond, influencing untold thousands of fans and musicians, not least Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.” This was echoed by Hart himself only recently, when said of Savage Young Du: “Hearing this stuff for the first time in a couple of decades, I [was] realizing the historical significance of what we were doing at the time. Of course, at the time, we were a bunch of kids playing rock ‘n’ roll in the basement. But the potential that Hüsker had showed right out of the gate.” RIP.