LINER NOTES: THE LADIES OF VARADES [2000]

1. Zambezi – The Fun Company
2. Rocks Off – The Rolling Stones
3. Golden Gaze – Ian Brown
4. Night Over Manaus – Boozoo Bajou
5. Reflexos – Quinteto Villa Lobos and Luiz Eca
6. Ali Baba – John Holt
7. Untouchable Sound – Make Up
8. D.C.B.A.-25 – Jefferson Airplane
9. Sagittarius Black – Timothy McNealy
10. 90% of Me is You – Gwen McCrae
11. Blips Drips and Strips – Stereolab
12. Ain’t’ it Funky Now – Grant Green
13. Soul Power – Lil Ray & The Fantastic Four
14. Hercules – Aaron Neville
15. Queen St. Gang (Soul Thing) – Arzachel
16. Holy Are You – The Electric Prunes
17. Loving Cup – The Rolling Stones
18. Every Baby Cries the Same – Make Up
19. Outer Bongolia – Stereolab
20. White Light/White Heat – The Velvet Underground

I became acquainted with the guy who owned a pager in 1996 after discovering that he was into jazz. I established this while browsing through his record collection and finding a copy of London Jazz Classics, which features 'Atlas' by The Robin Jones Seven and 'Ta Caliente' by Patsy Gallant, both of which are included on the notional compilation I imagined putting together in 1993. Another indicator was that he headed a Latin jazz-funk outfit called The Multi Headed Vibe Set, who played in and around our university.

The guy who owned a pager no longer owned a pager, he had a mobile phone. For a while we worked together at the Excelsior Hotel outside of Heathrow Airport where we’d drink whiskey tops at the end of 12 hour shifts – bottles of Budweiser with a shot of whiskey dispensed into them when our manager’s back was turned. We might then repair to his flat, on the border between Hounslow and Isleworth, and listen to the jazz, funk, ska and reggae he was accumulating onto MiniDisc. It was the ease with which he put together such compilations that would eventually persuade me to invest in the format.

The guy who now owned a mobile phone also introduced me to The Dive Bar in Chinatown on Newport Place, below what was then The King’s Head. Every Saturday, the Trojan Sound System selector Earl Gateshead would play a mixture of deep funk, soul, ska, rocksteady and Latin jazz. It made a nice change from our more regular haunts – Brentford (White Horse, The Griffin), Isleworth (Town Wharf, London Apprentice) or Hounslow (Shannons, The Rifleman) – and might sometimes be followed with a night out at Blow Up at the Wag on Wardour Street.

The Ladies of Varades gets its name from the former commune in the Loire-Atlantique department of Western France where a group of us hired a gite: myself, my lady friend, my Cornish friend who feinted, the guy who used to own a pager, his lady friend Roz Childs (not real name), No Eyes, her feller, and Galleon (not real name), a girl from North Yorkshire we knew from university. We pronounced Varades to rhyme with ladies, giving rise to the title of my compilation, and referred to the nearby town of Ancenis as Ants-nest – went to an outdoor music festival there and behaved like buffoons. The rest of the holiday was spent having barbecues, taking trips to la supermarché, lounging about in the sun and drinking bottled beer and plastic flagons of red wine mostly to the sounds myself and the guy who used to own a pager brought with us.

White Horse

It was a good time to be buying vinyl. Independent records labels were compiling all sorts of musical obscura, and I would journey to places such as Intoxica on Portobello Road in search of it (followed by a pint or two in the Portobello Star). 'Zambezi' by The Fun Company is the first track on Keb Darge’s Legendary Deep Funk, an excellent compendium of soulful funk and rare groove that was to provide this playlist’s backbone.

Around the same period, I made it my mission to acquaint myself with the ‘golden age’ of The Rolling Stones and took myself to a second-hand record shop in Twickenham intent on picking up any one of the four albums that constituted the canon. I came away with Exile on Main Street and was instantly smitten. I bought into it totally – the music, the production, the artwork, the fact this was the Stones’ only double album, what they were wearing at the time, that it was recorded on the French Riviera. 'Rock’s Off' is the opening track; it would also have been mine if not for The Fun Company.

'Night Over Manaus' by Boozoo Bajou originally came next, which is essentially chill-out music released not long before the term became ubiquitous (No Eyes’s feller was the source). I wasn’t happy with the transition and retroactively slipped in 'Golden Gaze' by Ian Brown from his album Golden Greats, which received a fair amount of play during our week in the Loire (supplied by Galleon). This allows for a more satisfying connection with the next track – 'Reflexos' by Quinteto Villa Lobos and Luiz Eca, taken from Blue Brazil Volume 2 (Blue Note In A Latin Groove), a compendium of jazz inflected bossa nova and samba that the guy who used to own a pager introduced me to.

'Ali Baba' has established itself as something of a reggae classic over the years, but it was relatively obscure back in the year 2000 and I had great difficulty finding a copy on vinyl. If you can lay your hands on it, Hottest Hits Volume 3 on Treasure Isle also contains the excellent John Holt tune 'Stealing Stealing' and Joya Landis’s equally impressive 'Moonlight Lover'. If not then you're looking at one of the many Greatest Hits collections out there.

Although the Make Up were current (only just: the band dissolved this same year) I felt they were mining something distinctively retrospective and assuredly not in keeping with current trends. I could sense in them the same sort of louche abandon I was getting from Exile-era Stones, less the drug induced decadence. Ian Svenonius’s hair augmented the impression. 'Untouchable Sound' comes as a shock after the previous tune, but I didn't know where else to put it.

When I bought my copy of Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow I fully expected using 'White Rabbit' for my next anthology. Instead 'D.C.B.A.–25' made the cut. I could have included both, but I had no shortage of material to work with and 'D.C.B.A.–25' carried less psychedelic baggage.

'Sagittarius Black' by Timothy McNealy is the second track off of Keb Darge’s Legendary Deep Funk and probably the best. I’d sometimes accompany the guy who used to own a pager to see Keb Darge play at Madame Jojo's on a Sunday evening, which is where the term deep funk originated. I'd have gone more often if I didn't have to work the next day.

I seem to recall that All Back To Mine, compiled by a disc jockey named Sean Rowley, was not cheap compared to some of the other compilations I’d been buying. Still, I filched two tracks from it so maybe it was money well spent. The first is '90% of Me is You' by the American soul singer Gwen McRae. The other is 'Holy Are You', which comes later.

With its jerky rhythms, 'Blips, Drips and Strips' carries off where Stereolab’s last LP, Dots and Loops, left off, although the album that spawned it – Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night – is not quite as good, although that’s like saying Rubber Soul isn’t quite as good as Revolver. Maybe, maybe not, but not much in it either way.

Gite Camp

I had by now left the hotel and was working for an audio-visual wholesaler in Brentford selling plasma screens and LCD/DLP projectors to high-end retailers and private customers, such as the television and radio presenter Jamie Theakston; he chucked his newly purchased, 40 kg plasma screen in the back seat of his open-top car and off he went.

I was situated in the warehouse, doing admin and taking stock, but it was expected that I muck in whenever goods were coming in or going out, which was often. I liked the people there and everyone tended to get on. Even management behaved reasonably. Every Friday after work, half the company seemed to descend on the Coach & Horses in Isleworth, and if you hung around for long enough the directors would start buying everybody drinks. It might be the best job I've ever had.

Grant Green’s cover of James Brown’s 'Ain’t it Funky Now' is taken from another series of Blue Note albums that were doing the rounds: precisely, Blue Break Beats Volume Two. This one was relatively inexpensive, and a little hit and miss as many of these sort of records often are.

'Soul Power' by Lil Ray & The Fantastic Four is Keb’s final contribution to my playlist. It's stuff like this that Earl Gateshead liked to play down at the Dive Bar, although that goes for Grant Green too. It's also typical of the records they'd drop down at the Wag.

'Hercules' by Aaron Neville had been in my possession for some time, on the Acid Jazz collection Totally Wired 6 I purchased in 1992. Only now did I have a concept for a compilation that could contain it. Like 'Ali Baba', it has since become ubiquitous. It’s the type of thing that will be played in the type of pub that's stripped back the plaster to reveal the brickwork underneath, ripped out the carpets and dimmed its lights. In other words, a gentrified one.

'Queens St. Gang' by Arzachel is a peculiar number I found on a peculiar compilation entitled Battle For The Planet Of The Breaks. Perhaps tellingly, it’s written by the guy who composed the theme music for Grandstand and the BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon – Keith Mansfield – although he was never actually a member of the band, and how he came to make his contribution is unclear. How to describe it? Psychedelic progressive rock might do.

The Electric Prunes are probably better known for the psychedelic garage-rock of tunes such as 'I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)'. Come their third album, the group had been coerced into working with classically trained composer and arranger David Axelrod, whose vision was far more progressive than their own. By the time of their the fourth album, Release of an Oath, the original line-up had departed, to be replaced with session players, effectively leaving Axelrod in complete control. This was psychedelic rock of a very different kind. The garage elements completely gone and lavish string arrangements put in their place, 'Holy Are You' becomes the climax of this compilation.

Or does it?

Mick Jagger is an under-rated lyricist. I don’t actually hold song lyrics in the high regard that some people do; they are beholden to the meter of the song and subservient to it. Mick Jagger understands this, which is why he can write lyrics like this:

I'm the man who walks the hillside in the sweet summer sun.

I'm the man that brings you roses when you ain't got none.

Notice how he’s the man who walks the hillside, and yet the same man that brings you roses. This is the correct emphasis but many lyricists would have missed it. Also observe the double negative in ‘ain’t got none’, which is a perfectly acceptable idiom within the vernacular of the blues but would be wholly inappropriate if Jagger was writing for the page. Lyrics are written to be sung, not read or spoken.

More Make Up, then the endlessly repetitive instrumental groove of Stereolab’s 'Outer Bongolia', taken from the EP The First of the Microbe Hunters released in May 2000, which forced itself onto my playlist at the last moment. Lasting 9 minutes and 29 seconds, I figured it might be a good tune to drink to late at night in France, which proved to be the case.

Dive Bar

I finish with The Velvet Underground’s 'White Light/White Heat', but it was never my intention. The fact is this compilation began life as a mix-tape – it was compiled before I’d bought a MiniDisc player – and the original cassette had about two thirds of 'Sister Ray' tacked on the end of the first side (I reasoned that if any tune could tolerate truncation it was that one.) The tapes I used were 90 minutes long, whereas my new MiniDiscs granted just 74 minutes of playing time, so 'Sister Ray' had to go. To accommodate 'Ali Baba', 'Golden Gaze' and 'White Light/White Heat', I also omitted 'Outer Bongolia' (since reinstated – I decided against reintroducing 'Sister Ray'). The singularity of the format also allowed me to re-arrange the running order to create a more balanced playlist. Older compilations were recalibrated to taste and I soon began experimenting with track listings for next year’s anthology. In its own quiet way MiniDisc was revolutionary.

[Listen to here.]