Steel Pulse - Handsworth Revolution

I fucking loved Steel Pulse as a kid. This is one of those LPs from around that time that, even though I didn’t own it, I was familiar with every track. My sister had the 12” of Ku Klux Klan, which got rinsed in our house, and I'd acquired the 7” of Prodigal Son from one of those newsagents cheapo random 7” rotating tower racks they would have at the time. The rest of it I guess I picked up by listening to John Peel, or by osmosis. I picked the actual LP up at a boot sale in Romford in the mid 80s. It has one of those Record & Tape Exchange stickers on the front which show it being reduced in price over time.

When I moved to Brum in my late 20s, I can remember how thrilled I was to be walking across Handsworth Park (going for a free veggie feed at the Sikh festival, which is in itself pretty thrilling) - my equivalent of when people go and walk across that zebra crossing at Abbey Road, I suppose. It didn’t look much like the record sleeve.

This holds up as a fine example of political British reggae, infused with the spirit of Jah and under the expert roots reggae knob-twiddler and exactly the right man for the job, Karl Pitterson. David Hines’s vocal style was ripped off wholesale by Sting, which is so obvious once you know.

The thanks list on the back of the sleeve has amongst its thankees, stalwart of Brummy pub-blues-rock, Steve Gibbons, and The Stranglers, both of which seem like odd mates.

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Andy Hamilton & the Blue Notes - Silvershine

Andy Hamilton left Jamaica to come to Britain as part of the Windrush generation, bringing with him his sweet tenor style: think Lester Young with a Caribbean flavour.

The thing that is universally repeated about Hamilton is that he wrote the tune Silvershine for Errol Flynn. However, I think it's much more interesting that he recalled the tune whilst lying in a diabetic coma in the 1980s. But that's just me.

Hamilton played every Monday night upstairs at The Bear in Bearwood, accompanied by a mix of old-spars and young guns coming up under his mentorship. We used to go occasionally, and I was introduced to him once by our housemate, who studied under him. He was clearly a very important man; extremely charismatic and super cool.

Honestly, if he had moved to the US, or even London, rather than Brum, he would be much better known.

It seems unbelievable to me now, that we didn't jump on the number 11 bus and go to see him every week. What were we thinking?

This album, released in 1991, features some big names from British jazz from that time: Andy Sheppard and Steve Williamson, for instance. Graeme, his trumpet-playing son, features, as does Jean Toussaint, who features on one track, as does a pre-Stars Mick Hucknall ,who, despite my reservations, does a decent job. Yep, I said it.

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