OCCUPIED COUNTRY

Home is where the Music is



When I was a young pup and 'twas bliss in that very dawn to be alive', I would sometimes take a relatively expensive leap in the dark and fork out for an album that I knew absolutely nothing about. I was hungry for the new. You didn't get much opportunity to hear new stuff back then. The Peel programme was an obvious source but, generally it was too much all at once. It seemed as if the entire thing consisted of unheard of and challenging material.


Most of the time I could get by on what I already had - or what my mates would lend me - but, occasionally, just occasionally, I needed something else. I would forego a weekend on the razz with my mates and invest in the unknown.

Many a time I missed the target - forgetable albums from forgotten 'pushers of the envelope'. But, on two occasions I hit paydirt.

Curtis Mayfield. Roots. Was a revelation. I loved it and love it still but I'd already heard some of Mayfield's stuff so it really wasn't out of the blue.

Early in 1972 I would have been 17. When the 'Neu Musik' bug hit I would head off to Manchester on a Saturday morning, pound notes in hand, loon pants flapping in the wind and platform soles adding a good four inches to my snake hipped frame. First stop would be the second hand record stalls on Church Street - now sadly gone. There was no Vinyl Exchange back then - shame, I would've been one of their regulars. After that, down to St Ann's Square to 'Paperchase'.

Upstairs it was a regular provider of stationery and suchlike but, for those in the know, downstairs was an impossibly cool record shop. Everything about the place oozed uber-chic. It was only the absolute certainty of the young that gave me balls to even enter. Looking back it wouldn't have surprised me if Jack Black had been disdainfully sneering at all and sundry from behind the counter but usually it would be an unattainable hippie Goddess with impeccable musical taste and flowing, etheral locks and huge eyes. A few years later I nipped in while in Manchester with my Grandad to pick some esoteric rarity up when I heard my Grandad ask the vision behind the counter if she had a copy of 'Morning Has Broken' by Edward Woodward. I never went back.

But I digress. On this particular day I bought an album that soon went out of print and, after years of trying to find it on CD or anything has finally just been re-issued. Hugh Masekela's 'Home is Where the Music Is'.  If you have a Spotify account then here you go: Hugh Masekela – Home Is Where The Music Is,  If not  you'll have to make do with the samples on Amazon.  I was going to post a track using Soundcloud but David Geffen won't let me.

It was the cover artwork that first attracted me.  Modern representations of Africans that seemed to me then - and now - vital and honest.  I hoped it would reflect the music within the sleeve and I wasn't wrong.  The opening Fender Rhodes riff on 'Part of a Whole' had me hooked and from there on in it wasn't hard for me to wallow.  It has become a part of my personal soundtrack.  I can't really remember a time without me knowing every solo, bass line, drum break and exquisite ensemble interaction.

The original's in the loft with a few hundred other long players.  The CD reissue has most - but not all - of the album sleeve's artwork and the 1972 back cover portrait of Mr Masekela is now the front cover, but you can't have everything as countless adults have been telling me all my life.

And what a line up - Masekela and Dudu Pukwana, Larry Willis, Makaya Ntshoko, Eddie Gomez with Caiphus Semenya providing a lot of the material and producing as well.

January 1972 it was recorded.  I'd just started working as a wages clerk in a local builders.  I just knew that one day I'd be sat where Larry Willis was.