Honest Jon's Records - Terry Hall And Mushtaq The Hour Of Two Lights LP
Terry Hall And Mushtaq The Hour Of Two Lights
Honest Jon's Records
‘Recorded as Blair and Bush were conspiring to strike fear and loathing
into the region responsible for these grooves, it’s every bit as topical as Ghost Town, as eerie as War Crimes’
(Time Out).
Nominally this is a collaboration between Terry Hall and Mushtaq,
once of British-Asian pioneers Fun-Da-Mental — but ‘everybody we worked with had a story to tell,’
recalls Terry Hall, ‘and their stories became part of the record.
We were blessed with the range of people we found.’
A Tunisian singer, a Syrian flautist, an Egyptian who had settled in Iraq,
a twelve-year old Lebanese girl, a blind Algerian rapper from Paris, a choir of Polish gypsy refugees
brought in from a social club in Leytonstone, the clarinettist who recorded the original Pink Panther theme;
singers in Hebrew, English, Arabic, Romany.
‘Everybody had a sense of something in common in their minority and oppression and struggle.
In the end, it felt more like we were editing a film than making a record.’ A year in development,
the album is also a powerful reflection of the time in which it was made and the storm that was gathering:
Bush and Blair were intent on Armageddon in Iraq; in the refugee camps on the West Bank,
atrocities were being committed on a daily basis; closer to home, sections of the British media used the fear
of terrorism to whip up a hate-fuelled campaign against asylum seekers and other minorities pushed to the margins of society.
‘What was going on as we were making the record seemed to make it more and more political.
We had something to say, but we wanted to avoid being worthy or preaching and keep the words to a minimum.’
Honest Jons
DER Platten Laden überhaupt am Ende der Portobello Road Londons. Egal ob spektakuläre Reissues oder super aktuelle und grossartige elektronische Musik - Honest Jon's hat die Finger im Spiel. "Informal University for music lovers" - wird der Laden liebevoll genannt und ist seit 1974 das Herz der Londoner Musik Community. Das Label Honest Jon's wird unter anderem von Notting Hill local Damon Albarn mitbetrieben. Seit 2008 veröffentlicht Honest Jon's immer wieder Leckerbissen aus den 150 000 78 - rpm Aufnahmen aus den klimakontrollierten archivräumen der EMI archives in Hayes England.
Erhältlich bei: Kitchener Bern
www.honestjons.com
EN: Honest Jon's is an independent record shop based on Portobello Road in Ladbroke Grove, London, operating since 1974. The shop is owned and run by Mark Ainley and Alan Scholefield, who took over from one of the original proprietors, "Honest" Jon Clare. Their record label of the same name is run in conjunction with Damon Albarn, who has been quoted as saying: "I don't really like the term world music. Wherever it comes from, it's all just music, isn't it? Hopefully that's what Honest Jon's is about - to open a few minds to what's out there."[1] The shop sells a multitude of genres of music on vinyl and CD, specializing in jazz, blues, reggae, dance, soul, folk and outernational. It runs a mail-order business from www.honestjons.com. Formed in 2002, the label has released compilation albums such as its London Is The Place For Me series, excavating the music of young Black London, in the years after World War II ("a fascinating archive of material from the 1950s and 60s, chronicling a time when diasporic rhythms were more or less the sole preserve of the small communities responsible for bringing them to these shores");[2] also collections of British folk, Port-of-Spain soca, Afro-Cuban jazz from the Bronx, Jamaican dancehall; and retrospectives of artists including Moondog, Maki Asakawa, Bettye Swann and Cedric "Im" Brooks & The Light of Saba. It has released original music by Candi Staton, Actress, T++, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Mark Ernestus, Trembling Bells, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Simone White, Shackleton, Michael Hurley, Terry Hall, and the Moritz Von Oswald Trio. It recorded the chaabi orchestra of Abdel Hadi Halo on location in Algiers; Lobi Traore and Kokanko Sata Doumbia in Bamako; and Tony Allen in Lagos. In 2008, Honest Jon's began a run of compilations of early recordings — mostly drawn from the EMI Archive in Hayes, Hillingdon — stretching back to the start of the twentieth century, covering all corners of the world: from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire more than a hundred years ago, to 1950s Beirut, to late-1920s Baghdad, to 1930s East Africa. wikipedia