Graham Massey

Postcard From The Village People

I write to you from up a mountain in southern Spain, sweating like a turkey at Christmas. I’m at the mother in law’s and while a Bernard Manning box set wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome, I seem to be unwinding from my grey summer in the rainy city back home. Suddenly I can taste and smell again and all music begins to sound better with a bit of landscape around you. A slight disaster with my 60-gig iPod has left me in a recent musical sulk, but now I’m beginning to cheer up!

Luckily there’s some dead guy’s jazz collection of dead jazz guys, all on cassettes with mini covers at the house... so cute! Plus an old Amstrad music centre with one speaker – I’m having a ‘moment’ to the Miles Davis album “Circle in The Round”. It just sounds awesome in the sunlight; sixties Miles is like a top shelf whiskey or indeed unusable mint liquor at the back of a cupboard, depending on your mood. I like to have it in my house reserved for private, contemplative moments in my smoking jacket; it’s not a social music.

Here in the village of Sella they love to share music. This is my second visit and again I’ve managed to coincide with the annual cultural festival. For a village of about 600 they have a lot going on,such as all-night musical events in the town square. Last year it ranged from a full production of “Caberet” to the village orchestra’s “1812 Overture” plus selected clips from “Star Wars” and a cd of Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” on repeat (I stopped counting at 30 plays).

This year’s highlight was the Michael Jackson tribute. A very rotund lipsyncing Michael is on stage doing an esoteric selection of Jackson’s music, climaxing with “Thriller”, when various teenagers start doing the zombie dance coming out of doorways for an audience of genuinely scared-looking pensioners. Each zombie has a letter in magic marker on his or her vest and they form a line to spell out ‘Michael’ except that some poor little girl has had her hair set on fire by a flaming torch and the lipsyncing falls into chaos as an unplanned re-enactment of THAT Jackson Pepsi commercial takes place! You think I’m making this up don’t you, no no. You will be glad to know we kept seeing the little girl over the next few days with bandaged shoulders yet she remained quite jolly and continued to generate lots of fuss.

Another event we stumbled on a few streets away involved some members of the orchestra playing an impression of ancient Moors music to accompany a lecture by a local professor of history… on Sella and 400 years since the expulsion of The Moors. Again attended by young and old alike, like a scene from “Cinema Paradiso”, an outdoor screen wafting in the wind, the professor doesn’t tone anything down for his audience. Not that I understand a word of Valenciana (the local language) – you just get the body language, the wagging finger andlots of slides about ancient trade routes and water supplies.

The professor is wheelchair bound in a village where every street has a gradient of 1 in 7 so he’s got big arms. There are poetry readings also in Velenciana that

are more like boxing matches. It’s a well bitchy place, you can pick up all the goss without the use of language. A few nights ago there was a local death metal band on that started at about 2am in the town square preceded by a solo Tuba recital and some impassioned Flamenco singing with too much vibrato. Then they march around the village at 8am with drums and bombards (oboe-like instruments). No wonder they have a siesta in the afternoon!

The nearest supermarkets are 20km away near Benidorm; it’s a weird experience coming out of the 15th century and approaching Benidorm.Not as tacky as I expected... like somefuture Atlantis set against this stark,ancient landscape. We pull over at an antique market/car boot sale. I instantly get a sustain pedal for my Yamaha CP30 piano – what are the chances of that?

We sit in the restaurant and watch the fascinating British custom of dancing to power ballads at midday; I must say it looks equally as passionate as Flemenco,all glazed eyes and furrowed brows.

Rochdale Steve’s banging out Neil Diamond covers on guitar and laptop. Ilike to think he may have some DNA link to Rochdale’s other famous laptoppers,Autechre, who’d suit the architecture of this baked metropolis far better.Luckily the car has a cassette player and the plaintive sixties futurism of“Sanctuary” from “Circle in the Round” is the perfect soundtrack as we climbback into the mountains. My son asserts that I only like music by dead people,(Note to self: idea for a séance-based music night with psychics and dead musicians).

Which brings me back to Manchester and the re-opening of Band On TheWall this month. Once the haunt of dead jazz guys in Manchester, whatmight it be in its revamped funded form in today’s climate? I will tell you my fears: first is that it becomes The Jazz Café of the north, where jazz is replaced by jazziness and Sony put up a conveyor belt of their latest singer songwriters. Second is that it becomes the Manchester bus stop for the established and powerful post-Jools generation of WOMAD-type agents, you know thesort. They use the words Soul Jazz and Hip Hop in the same sentence or, worse still, “East meets West”, for all that box ticking, funded music.

I hope it keeps a close connection with local musicians and indeed it looks like it will do that, but it all looks a bit adult at the moment. No younger promoters, no unknown acts to discover. I guess it will take time to find its feet and indeed many nights are already sold out, so what do I know?

I don’t want to be cynical I just think its edginess was very important. Youoften saw visiting artists really respond to its funky warmth and our veryspecial Mancunian clued-up audience’s welcome.

I have a deep fondness for BOTW; I did some of my first gigs there back in 1978. As an 18-year-old it felt like an acceptance into a wider world of music. Punk lived there, jazz lived there, there may not have been such a thing as ‘world music’ but it lived there. BOTW had a great openness to possibility and community, a great sound system and you could always book in when you had something to present... a bit like the town square back in Sella, I suppose.