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DVD Review
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Financial Times (U.S. Edition), DVD Review >>
DAVID HONIGMANN
WORLD MUSIC
Psychedelia turns to roots reggae
At school in the US in the 1980s, owning a copy of Dark Side of the Moon meant you were a stoner. (At school in the UK, it simply meant you were at school in the UK.) So it is fitting that, amid this summer of rival versions of Pink Floyd touring their own performances of the album, an upstart version is turning the psychedelic classic into roots reggae.
Dub Side of the Moon is what Pink Floyd would have sounded like in a parallel universe where they were produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry. The live version, just out on DVD, sees the Brooklyn-based Easy Star All-Stars taking the show on the road in a joyous excess of 1970s pomp. There is dry ice and a lightshow; there are slides projected on to giant globe; there is animation, set in the spaceship the USS Syd Barrett (even more poignant now, after his death), of an orbiting "Rastanaut". The original Dark Side seems a quint-essentially English album, so it is surprising how well it works in this reading. But psychedelia always shared with dub an appreciation of the manipulation of sound, and art-school angst is not so far from dread.
Certainly, when Tamar-Keli soars into soul diva wailing on "The Great Gig in the Sky", or Menny More toasts over Bas 1-Ray's sprung bass rhythms on "Time" and "Money", the project makes perfect sense.
Pink Floyd's musical universe is generally too hermetic to allow for successful covers. (Not altogether: Billy Bragg used to perform "Arnold Layne" in the style of a lost Jam classic; Milla Wood does an appropriately breathy ambient-jazz reading of "Breathe"; bootlegs have mashed up "Wish You Were Here" with the Orb, or Animals with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.)
But western rock has its admirers. Listen to the ideologues, and you'd think cultural appropriation all ran one way: assorted Simons, Byrnes and Gabriels looting the musical patrimony of the rest of the world and using it to spice up their rock cliches with a hint of sunshine. But world musicians are just as capable of liking what they hear. At the Real World celebration last month, the Mauritanian singer Daby Toure was asked about his influences, the questioner clearly hoping for a catalogue of the African diaspora in Paris. "Well," replied Toure hesitantly, "The Beatles, The Police..." The record that spawned a thousand bands in the Spanish-speaking world was, improbably, the Clash's Sandinista.
Western rock may have sounded tired here; as Tom Stoppard argues in his new play, elsewhere it sounded like the chimes of freedom ringing. The Tuvan throat- singer Albert Kuvezin of Yat-Kha paid tribute to the sounds of his youth last year in a collection of covers of warhorses, from "Love Will Tear Us Apart" to "When The Levee Breaks". The result at times was uncomfortably hilarious, but the affection was palapable.
The unlikeliest songs resonate far afield. Tarika, from Madagascar, sang an ethereal version of "Be My Baby", fragile and fragrant as an Indian Ocean night. The Senegalese singer Wasis Diop's "Defaal Lu Wor" is unmistakably a reading of Talking Heads's "Once in Lifetime" turning the original's fascination with west African polyrhythms back on itself. The Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" can be found in a South African by Shikisa. Even Vanessa Paradis's frothy "Joe le Taxi" turns up in Trinidadian style sung by Sharlene Boodram, with growling dancehall rap from Patrick Cordon.
Almost anything can be turned into reggae, of course. Shinehead's "Jamaican in New York" has lighter touch than its source. Sting's "Englishman In New York". And another band, Jah Division, exists purely to perform Joy Division covers. "Dub Will Tear Us Apart" starts like the original, with an insistent bass pulse and ticking cymbals, but just where Joy Division sweep up into an overpowering climax, the dub version falls into space, vocals shredded electronically, drum beats woozy with reverb. Fit tingly, the song really does tear itself apart.
Dub Side of the Moon Live is released by Easy Star (US only at present)
08/02/06
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