‘I’ve been waiting all my life to shed light on them’: musicians on their unsung hometown heroes
Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl (Phoenix, Arizona)
They were an eccentric duo from Arizona, and they travelled around in a beat-up station wagon – I ended up playing shows with them a lot in my teens. I was about 15 when I first saw them. Amy Ross could hear a song on the radio while they drove to the show and play it that night – she had an incredible ear for songs. They were spontaneous and playful and serious and there was a real humanity to them that resonated with me. They didn’t have much besides acoustic guitars and a piano but the way they could play with so little was really inspiring to me. I must have seen them 20 or 30 times. Luckily, in Phoenix there was a great DIY scene and so it was pretty easy to see live shows – there were all-age art spaces that musicians under 21 could play at, so I was really lucky in that way.
Tjinder Singh, Cornershop
Bhujhangy Group (Leicester)
For me, there was only one group that was worth recording consistently, hence lugging about a massive ghetto blaster that lit up like the Golden Temple. That group was Bhujhangy Group, from rural workers of the
Punjab that had transferred their music into an award-winning package in Birmingham’s Soho Road. Punjabi folk music was one thing but with their added percussion and multiple synthesisers you were led into a devotional music experience that was worth the believing.
Justin Young, the Vaccines
Jets Vs Sharks (Southampton)
There was a really healthy hardcore scene in Southampton and on the south coast. It was incredibly welcoming and inclusive and I remember really looking up to a lot of the local bands, like Disposable Heroes, Pilger, Parade of Enemies, and especially Jets Vs Sharks. I still have all their 7in records. I thought they were all rock stars, but they’d be playing to 20 people a night. With the exception of Delays, no rock bands came out of Southampton, so there was no one to really look up to locally on a larger scale. Real success felt completely alien and unattainable. London was 80 miles away but it may as well have been another planet.
Emily Haines, Metric
Blue Planet (Toronto, Ontario) When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I weren’t into drinking alcohol, we were into psychedelics. There was this place called the Theatre in a neglected building on a sketchy street in Toronto that we would frequent every weekend. It was run by a wellintentioned, long-bearded man whose name sadly escapes me now. The place was all ages, and no weird geez were ever there, it was just kids. Entry was free, but you needed to donate a can of food to a local food bank to get in. As I recall, we always showed up screaming-high with cans of beans in our purses. They didn’t serve any booze, only water. The band playing there was called Blue Planet, a kind of Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead hybrid. It was just a bunch of sweet stoned kids trying to dance but mostly hugging. Telling you about it now makes me realise it was utopian.
Pierce Jordan, Soul Glo
Rise from Ruin
Maryland)
In Calvert County, MD, around 2005 and 2006, there was a well-loved deathcore band in the area called Rise from Ruin. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to shed light on this band, (Huntingtown,
but to be honest I don’t know when exactly they stopped playing – I think it might’ve been around 2007. When I learned about them, I was deeply in my metal bag. They had two vocalists, and they took a lot of influence from bands like Job for a Cowboy and As Blood Runs Black. A little later in life I was playing county youth basketball and their bassist Mitch was coaching one of the teams I played against. They ruled.
Nakhane
The Joy of Africa (Gqeberha, South Africa)
My mum and her sisters sang in a choir called the Joy of Africa, and my dad was president, but the reason I chose them is that when I was growing up I didn’t really know what a band was. My mum raised me on the O’Jays and the Temptations, but I didn’t know they were bands – they were singers. Not until late adolescence did I realise bands existed, when I saw Myspace. I only knew choirs or orchestras or steel drum collectives because that was the world I was in. I loved the Joy of Africa – it wasn’t just a choir for the sake of singing but almost outreach. My mum helped the women with their lives – she would organise sanitation pads and so on. When I started writing and recording music, the first thing I wanted to do was stack my vocals to sound like a choir – because that was my staple food.
Stuart Braithwaite, Mogwai
The Yummy Fur (Lanark)
The Yummy Fur had been going a couple of years before Mogwai started, so they were established in the Glasgow scene – Paul Thomson and Alex Kapranos went on to Franz Ferdinand – but I’m from Lanarkshire, which is where they came from originally, too. Their records are among the best that came out of Scotland – very funny songs, very witty and acerbic. It was almost cartoonish music, influenced by early Roxy Music and the Fall – quite angular and wonky. They played a lot around Glasgow and they had the same people going to see them show after show. It takes a bit of investment to break out internationally – you need PR and pluggers – and they were almost too indie. But in Glasgow they were filling smaller rooms and it’s really good to have that kind of band around whom people coalesce.
Nabihah Iqbal
Capdown (Milton Keynes)
They had two albums that came out on a British punk label called Household Name. When I saw them for the first time they blew my mind – and then every time they played I would go. I found my gig scrapbook recently and I had stuck all their tickets in. There was such energy on the stage, and those kinds of gigs with lots of moshing and stagediving were amazing when I was 13. Even at a daytime show you knew you would get that same intense energy. That was my introduction to gigs, and I made friends by getting there early and seeing the same people over and over again in the queue. The act of queueing up was a ritual itself.
Hannah Jadagu
Fishing in Japan (Dallas, Texas)
One of the bands I loved in high school was the Dallas four-piece Fishing in Japan. They were an indie-pop band who began making music around 2018. My now friend and collaborator Wolfgang Hunter founded the band while still in high school – the same high school as my sister. It was a performing arts school in Dallas – being in a band was sort of a natural activity for anyone who went there but they were definitely everyone’s favourite. A core memory is sitting in my sister’s car on the way to school and hearing their shimmering blend of pop and rock for the first time. It was one of those “Wait … this is so cool!” moments that has stuck with me.
• Who was the best act from your home town who never made it? Let us know in the comments
intuitive use of “long shots that allowed scenes to build, giving you a sense of involvement in the moment”. Akomfrah agrees. Rather than an emphasis on performance, Ové was more concerned about the environment of a scene and what was happening within the frame. “The freedom of the camera allows the viewer’s eye to roam, to participate in the action,” says Akomfrah. In A Hole In Babylonwe become complicit in the drama. That immediacy is evident also in documentaries such as Dabbawallahs(1985), shot sympathetically from the point of view of Mumbai dabbawalla porters who race through the streets with trolleys teetering with myriad lunchboxes; it’s an extraordinarily empathic portrayal.
Everyone I spoke to attests to the warm, inviting and mischievous atmosphere Ové created on his sets. Given the seriousness of his subject matter, the tales of his playfulness are surprising. The humour, though, always had an edge to it, as was particularly evident in Playing Away(1987), a comic drama written by Caryl Phillips about a south London cricket team who travel to the English countryside for a tournament. “The tone of that film was very different to contemporary dramas about issues and conflicts,” says Phillips, dropping in and out of reception as his train hurtles between Princeton and NYC. “Horace fully understood the nuances of British society.” Playing Away highlighted those commonalities, for instance, centred on class, that trumped race.
He was a charismatic man who galvanised collaborators. On learning about James Baldwin’s appearance at the West Indian Student Centre in London’s Earls Court in 1963, he quickly assembled a crew and headed to the venue. There Ové charmed Baldwin and Dick Gregory into allowing him to shoot footage and capture the fierce intellectual exchanges that echoed through the rafters that evening to produce the film he later confidently called Baldwin’s Nigger. This title was a reference to a descriptive phrase Baldwin himself used in the debate and documentary. The writer and civil rights activist explained that he was descended from people enslaved by a white man called Baldwin, who would refer to these enslaved people with that pejorative term.
“Horace Ové’s influence was huge,” says Gus John. “He represented to black people in Britain what Wole Soyinka and Fela Kuti represented to Nigerians.”
I’d also make the comparison to the way James Baldwin represented African Americans. “Fearless” was the word people most repeatedly reached for when describing Ové, followed closely by “generous”. “He licensed black trust,” recalls Akomfrah. “He made us feel that working as a black collective towards a shared end was legitimate.” He leaves an indelible mark on generations of black creatives. “After meeting Horace, nothing scares me.”
Zak Ové offers the final tribute by saying his father pulled down barriers that were determined to confine black artists to arenas characterised by the defence of themselves against racism; that tried to lock them into the reductive over-identification with race as their subject. “He made it possible to imagine ourselves beyond those constraints and fly free.”
• Power to the People: Horace Ové’s Radical Vision is at the BFI, London, until 30 November. A restored version of Pressure opens in UK cinemas on 3 November
Horace’s influence was huge. He represented to black people in Britain what Fela Kuti represented to Nigerians
Gus John
strong sign that even the film-makers could tell this performance was going to convince no one, so best just smother it in a surge of treacly strings.
Writer-director Jesse V Johnson has scant talent for dialogue either; Horrible Histories had more gravitas. What Johnson is good at – and so he should be, given his earlier career as a stunt performer and coordinator – is choreographing fights and fisticuffs. Although the film often looks like a home movie shot with half a dozen live action role play devotees messing around in a forest, the thwacking of swords and plunging of knives is a bit of a hoot. At one point, someone gets their head cut off and the dismembered visage keeps on blinking and gasping with incredulity at this indignity – a sensation viewers of this film will undoubtedly relate to. • Boudica is released on 30 October on digital platforms.