Capital Charge
This month’s hidden room in rock’s mansion of mystery – a migrant reacts to the metropolis.
ESTABLISHED BY Antiguan businessman Milton Samuel, the independent Beacon label began trading above a timber yard in Willesden in 1968, down the road from Trojan Records’ Neasden Lane HQ. Small but ambitious, the label’s first success came after it licensed The Showstoppers’ rough-cut Philly soul number Ain’t Nothing But A House Party, a Number 11 UK hit in April ’68. Misses followed, however, by acts including The Mar ylebone Ensemble, The Brixton Market and The Funky Bottom Congregation. Another release that failed to ignite would have more long-term success piquing listeners’ interest – Black London Blues by Ram John Holder.
Born in British Guyana in 1934, the man named John Wesley Holder’s father was a guitar-playing Methodist minister in Georgetown, and he grew up surrounded by music both spiritual and secular. A keen singer thrilled by the blues, Ray Charles and gospel groups including The Five Blind Boys Of Alabama, he moved to the US in 1954, initially studying to become a preacher. In 1958, as Ramjohn Holda & The Potaro Porknockers, he recorded Songs
Of The Guiana Jungle in New York (he says he took the ‘Ram’ prefix from a Georgetown fruiterer, not as some reports say because he fronted
The Ram Jam Band in
London). He was active on the Greenwich Village folk circuit, and recalls actor Lou
Gossett Jr. asking him to pass the hat round at the Café Rafio for a young singer named Bobby Zimmerman.
“Before and after I went to the States, I’m socially conscious, politically active, aware of the struggle,” says Ram John Holder today. “I was attracted to learning, literature, music and liberation struggles, which I was very involved in. In my student activities, I got into trouble with the American government.”
Consequently, by 1962 he was in London working as an actor and musician. From ’66 he cut pop and R&B sides for Columbia and Parlophone, and worked relentlessly, playing folk nights at venues including the Marquee and the Witches Cauldron in Belsize Park. One notable event was an anti-Rhodesia benefit billed ‘PSYCHODELPHIA versus Ian Smith GIANT FREAK OUT!’, held at the Roundhouse in December ’66, where Pink Floyd played with the Ram Holder Messengers. “I was top of the bill and Pink Floyd were my supporting group!” he says. “I was all over the place then. My God, I don’t know how I got the energy.”
Though Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones unsuccessfully recommended Holder to Joe Boyd at Elektra, Ram John found a welcome at Beacon. Recorded in a 4-track studio on Denmark Street over a few four-hour sessions, Black
London Blues found the singer/ guitarist joined by three musicians from Trinidad who he regularly gigged with: future Jeff Beck Group member Clive Chaman on bass, his brother Stan on guitar and Bobby
Mauge on drums. Tom Parker played “Ray Charles-type” piano, while the surname of the West Indian sax player named Colin has been lost to time.
In 1969, the same year Holder filmed John Boorman’s satirical comedy Leo The Last alongside Marcello Mastroianni, Black
London Blues was released. The sleeve found the groovy-looking artiste leaning on a lamp post on a cold, rainy west London street. It’s an apt cover shot: the LP’s loose, funky blues with gnarly guitar solos and personalised accounts of immigrant frustrations suit the image’s blocked sink, pre-decimal Britishness to a tee. Similarly, this blues-via-the-Caribbean in a still-hippy English situation has its own flavours, distinct from the authenticity-minded homegrown scene. Blues tropes spin sideways: in Pub Crawling Blues the narrator stays up all night drinking pints of bitter and bottles of wine at The Star and The Bull And Bush. Notting Hill Eviction Blues evokes hiding from the rent collector, hand-to-mouth living and the ever-present threat of being out on the street. The sauntering, mocking, on-edge title song further identifies how the deck is stacked: writing to his mum from Brixton jail, the protagonist mentally walks Kilburn High Road, Petticoat Lane and Portobello Road and admits, “I had a shock in store for me” in “freaky, foggy London town… the racist landlord… the prejudice stares you right in the face.” After nocturnal stop-offs at a Wimpy Bar and Piccadilly Circus, where label boss Samuel gets a namecheck, Hampstead To Lose The Blues completes the cycle, as the narrator heads north from Brixton on the London underground and bus network to a brighter future.
“What the record came out of was experiences,” says Holder, who’d finessed the material playing it live in the clubs. “They’re very documentary, the songs. When you had the Rachman thing in the early ’60s, eviction became a scandal. Brixton Blues is a very graphic commentary on what actually happened to me on my first night in London. Same with Pub Crawling Blues – I was a big pub crawler!”
Holder recorded follow-up Bootleg Blues in 1971, widening his vision, he said, “beyond black London and out into the wider realm of Europe” though Hampstead Blues’ admission “I’ve got to get away from here” suggested he remained unfulfilled (Graham Coxon has covered its song Way Up High live). After 1975’s You Simply Are, Holder concentrated more on acting, and in 1989 found fame playing Augustus ‘Porkpie’ Grant on Channel 4’s pioneering black sitcom Desmond’s. After Desmond’s ended in 1994, Porkpie got his own series, having won £10 million on the lottery. Appearances in EastEnders, Death In Paradise and, on-stage, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom followed for Holder. He’s pleased that
Black London Blues is still resonating in 2022. “I was way ahead of my time,” he says with a laugh. “You know, I’m no B.B. King, I’m no John Lee Hooker, I’m no Muddy Waters… I am Ram John Holder!”
“I was a big pub crawler!” RAM JOHN HOLDER
“Forget blues rock for a new kind of space rock.”
“THERE WAS no ‘idea’ behind it,” said Klaus Schulze in 1997, discussing the 1970 formation of Ash Ra Tempel with Manuel Göttsching. “We just did it. No big thing. [Back then] people founded groups, joined groups, left groups, disbanded groups. Nobody cared.”
What he doesn’t mention is the speakers. For in the summer of 1970, when the 21-year-old Schulze walked into West Berlin’s Beat Studio, having just been dismissed as Tangerine Dream’s drummer, what stopped him in his stacks was the speakers belonging to Manuel Göttsching’s Berlin-based blues-jazzimprov outfit the Steeple Chase Blues Band: four huge WEM speaker cabinets, previously owned by Pink Floyd. Here was the ‘idea’. “I said, We must form a band. I said, Forget blues rock for a new kind of ‘space rock’.”
Göttsching, born in 1952 in West Berlin, was a classically trained guitarist who’d had his head turned by free jazz. Schulze rechristened his band: Ash representing “the remains, the final curtain”, Ra, the Egyptian Sun God, and Tempel, a place for rest and contemplation. Perhaps more significantly, Schulze introduced Göttsching to Ohr
Recordings’ Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser.
Kaiser, who worked with his girlfriend Gille Lettmann and
“schlager” music publisher and
Hansa founder Peter Meisel, believed in a utopian new psychedelic music that would combine German folk and mythological traditions with improvisation, psychedelics and transportive religious communion: Kosmische Musik. For a brief period, the Ash Ra members were involved in numerous Kaiser projects, including the epic psychedelic party jams he released as The Cosmic Jokers, plus the tribal space-funk freakouts of Walter Wegmüller’s Tarot, and Sergius Golowin’s mountainside dream trip, Lord Krishna Von Goloka.
And, of course, an acid-fuelled session with US FBI fugitive and psychedelics guru Timothy Leary, Seven
Up. Kaiser’s projects arguably deserve a How To Buy of their own; they certainly obscure the divergent trajectories that Göttsching and Schulze’s music took once the Tempel collapsed and both began experimenting with electronic music. Here we focus on those individual paths while highlighting their best work together. Inevitably, recordings have been left out, some because their historical significance outweighs the listening pleasure
(Seven Up), others because they are nigh-on impossible to buy without applying for a second mortgage.