Skip to main content

That Corner Pocket Bubble Groove: “Outa-Space” by Billy Preston

By Marcello Carlin



At last, a good record! Better still, it’s another instrumental! “Outa-Space” began life as the B-side to the single “I Wrote A Simple Song” before – guess what, readers? – radio DJs flipped it and the public flipped in turn. An irresistible electrofunk groove before electrofunk was formally thought of, Preston plugs his Hohner Clavinet into a wah-wah pedal, improvises on a groove and (apparently, though it’s inaudible on the record) yells out chord changes to his backing group, who respond magnificently, particularly drummer Manuel Kellough. All this just ahead of the second coming of Stevie Wonder, too. Furiously danceable, the tune could theoretically go on forever – and hence House music arrives, fourteen yards ahead of schedule; “Outa-Space” is a possible missing link between Westbrook’s “Original Peter” and Phuture’s “Acid Tracks.” Lena says it reminds her of Simple Minds, and hence Kraftwerk (who must have been aware of the record). Throw in a little early-eighties Scritti too (“Asylums In Jerusalem”) and you have the perfect end to an aesthetically frustrating week. All good ones next week, though!

Date Record Made Number Two: 8 July 1972
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1
Record At Number One: “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers
UK Chart Position: None

Comments

  1. David G. Shaw10 March 2018 at 09:53

    There’s definitely some of this in “Theme for Great Cities.”

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

By Marcello Carlin
The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline. The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different su...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Disaffection, Or Fight Against Same: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty

By Marcello Carlin
Even as a young teenager growing up in Lanarkshire, I was always listening out for music that sounded out of kilter, whether it was George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III (the closing section of which I heard on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3) or anything which “irrupted” the top forty. From the first time that I heard “Baker Street” on the radio – I think it was Dougie Donnelly on Radio Clyde – I was immediately hooked, mentally noting that this song seemed to go as much against the grain of a standard pop record as anything coming out of punk or New Wave, and was probably just as angry, if not angrier. For forty years I harboured the notion – and this was from a time when visiting London, never mind living and working in it, was still a distant pipedream – that the song encapsulated the situation of the displaced Scotsman, marooned in a world he doesn’t really like or perhaps even understand. Make no mistake, this is undeniably a Scottish record, and seemingly all about someone...
1 comment
Read more

“I Would Have Thought In The Middle Of The Atlantic In The Middle Of The Night That Rockets Must Mean Trouble”: “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc

By Marcello Carlin
"watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by." (Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956) This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable. But the magic here lies in the extraordinary ...
2 comments
Read more