Eddy Grant

Feel like today's a good day to do something fairly basic and limited in scope, so here's everything I know about Eddy Grant.

In America Eddy Grant is a one-hit wonder, known for one thing and one thing only - the 1983 hit single "Electric Avenue", which sounded kind of like "1999" but wasn't.  I remember hearing it and loving it in my youth - maybe it stuck around longer than '83, or maybe it was unusually memorable to my seven-year-old self.  I didn't have any concept that there was a real street called "Electric Avenue"; I took it as a fictional boogie-funk paradise, with perhaps some faint link to Disneyland's Main Street Electrical Parade, an enormous band of computer people marching down the street.  Well, shit, I didn't pick up on the apocalyptic implications of "1999" either.

When a song touches on a place that's real to the singer, but not somewhere I've ever been, or vice versa... there's an interesting gap in understandings there.  Words may be open to interpretation, but places are _really_ open to interpretation.  Slapp Happy sings about "hoboken", pronouncing it wrong, as some exotic land of spies, and I know it from D. Manus Pinkwater's book "The Hoboken Chicken Emergency" and from going with my dad every year to the Hoboken train festival - not somewhere mysterious and exotic, an ordinary suburb of New York City.  Trains, because my dad loved them, they do have a certain resonance to me, a certain mystique, but then I hear Robyn Hitchcock sing "I often dream of trains" and Basingstoke and Reading are as unattainable and foreign as eternity, possibly moreso.

Lots of interpretation challenges between me and Robyn on that album.  How am I supposed to interpret "Sometimes I wish I were a pretty girl"?  How does my experience map on to his?  How does my knowledge that his dad wrote the penis mutilation novel "Percy", a movie for which the Kinks' "Lola" appeared on the soundtrack, shape that understanding?

Scope, Kate.  You were talking about Eddy Grant, not about the gender politics of the Pink Fairies' ten minute rock opus "I Wish I Were A Girl" (_Kings of Oblivion_, 1973).

My point is that I didn't know, and I'm not sure most of America knows to this day, about Grant's involvement in the pioneering racially integrated band "The Equals", didn't know that he wrote "Police On My Back" (still have a tendency to mix it up with Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves").  I occasionally encounter him the way I encounter most music, sideways, through unpredictable paths.  At some point I ran across the Equals' final album, 1977's "Mystic Syster".  I'm not sure at all whether Grant had any involvement in this - he left the group due to health issues years prior.  Whether or not he had anything to do with it, it's a fantastic album, fantastic in a way that's sui generis.  I don't know any other records that sound like Mystic Syster, and I've heard a lot of records at this point.  It's the synth sound that grabs me most, the parping-est synth work I've ever heard.  Writing about music, even though I've done a lot of it, is still hard, because if a record is really good, what exactly it is is hard to put into words.  All I can really get to is that I fucking love this record and you should listen to it.

As for Eddy, he was certainly doing solo shit around this time.  There's a certain extremely small cult following among crate-diggers for the 12" version of his disco song "Everybody Dance".  I like very short songs and very long songs, songs that defy our understanding of how time in music is supposed to work.  The 12" "Everybody Dance" goes on for fucking ever, 17:44 to be precise, and if something goes on long enough the chances that it'll get weird rise.  In the case of "Everybody Dance" it starts sounding like a disco take on Terry Riley's underrated "Shri Camel".  I am particularly interested in the hypnotic, not to say hypnagogic, uses of the deep disco groove, either version of Dinosaur's "Kiss Me Again", either Patrick Cowley mix (the more common mix or the finished "True" mix) of "Hills of Katmandu", and the 12" of Everybody Dance deserves a place alongside those titans of the disco 12".

He's had a long career since, mostly unknown to me.  He's a big name in the soca field, which is a genre I respect a lot and don't much know shit about.  The only soca track of his I have is a track called "Ice Cream" by someone named "Duke" from 1994.  (Compare and contrast: the amazing late-period hot blues track "Ice Cream" by Captain John Handy, not to be confused with the better known third stream jazz musician John Handy, whose two-track album I enjoy much better in the 7" edits; see also "Ice Cream To God" by the little-known early '80s post-punk band "Kitchen and the Plastic Spooons, note the three o's; the fantastic 2013 alt-R&B record "Ice Cream Everyday" by Amel Larrieux; "Ice Cream For Crow" by Captain Beefheart; John Baker's radiophonic jazz soundtrack to "The Ice Cream Man", a sadly now-lost episode of the 1960s British television series Vendetta; The Melvins covering the Butthole Surfers' "Graveyard" in Chicago for the AV Club next to a truck giving out free ice cream to the little ones; the Tornadoes' Joe Meek-goes-Bo-Diddley deep cut "The Ice Cream Man"; Nick Didkovsky's hour-long commissioned composition "Ice Cream Time").  Wikipedia's one-paragraph summary of Grant's life's work feels compelled to mention that he pioneered the genre "ringbang", which is a genre I have literally never heard of before now.  This is either a testament to the ways in which the musical knowledge of even an obsessed autodidact like me can be limited, the infinite horizons of discovery stretching out in all directions, or possibly the equally infinite ability of humanity to invent genres no reasonable person could possibly actually give a shit about.  I like Grant a lot, so I'll assume the former.