Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
It has been an exceptionally busy week in non-free-Substack-land, so this week—coming to you live and direct from an airport departure lounge—is another, plucked-from-the-top-of-my-head…
To begin, a Robert Kilroy-Silk addendum. In response to last week’s letter about the eccentric British TV host, a number of readers got in touch to share some of their favorite Kilroy-related memories.
Michael Brooke chimed in with some further background on Kilroy-Silk’s disastrous political vanity project Veritas, which cost poor old former boxer Winston McKenzie a fortune. Ben Bennett, meanwhile, kindly reminded me of the time in 2004 when, in the wake of the imbroglio surrounding Kilroy-Silk’s Islamophobic newspaper column, a 37-year-old man, David McGrath, splattered him with a bucket of manure, resulting in the following haunting image:
The Guardian reported the altercation thusly: “After covering his victim's £600 suit, shirt and silk tie, Mr McGrath said: ‘You insulted my brother's religion. You insulted Islam,’ the court was told. Mr Kilroy-Silk wiped some of the manure over McGrath’s face, saying: ‘Oh, you like shit, do you? Let me give it to you back.’” Let me give it to you back, indeed.
Les Pitt brought something even more disturbing back into my consciousness: a Kilroy-Silk-themed segment, “The Day Kilroy Lost His Mind”, from the first episode of Chris Morris’s astonishingly dark and hostile Channel 4 comedy-mixtape show Jam, broadcast in 2000. (Ignore the confusing I’m a Celebrity… labelling of the YouTube vid.) I remember watching this at the time, and thinking to myself: “I probably shouldn’t be watching this.” Twenty-three years on, I feel pretty much the same way. Here’s a bit more on Jam, for the uninitiated.
This week, for the first time in absolutely ages, I stuck on Dizzee Rascal’s debut LP “Boy in da Corner” (2003), a trailblazing British grime record that sounded, at the time, like nothing I’d ever heard before. I’m sure genre experts can point me in the direction of the album’s sonic lineage, but to this day I remain pretty shaken by the stark brutalism of lead single “I Luv U”, which features incredibly harsh, spare production, and a sound on the beat that sounds like someone’s final, gasping breath being played over and over again. And then there’s those, flat, spat-out bars (“That’s boy’s some prick you knaaa!”)
Now, while I may not be 100% on “Boy in da Corner”’s musical influences, I think I can safely say I identified the key reference for its cover art:
That’s right, it’s the prolific French pianist Richard Clayderman, who I only discovered was French in the process of Google-researching this gag!
Speaking of French, this next rec… I mean, I have to be real. I didn’t find it digging through the crates in some outer boroughs record store, or on some 3am NTS stream for the heads. I literally heard it while strolling through H&M in a New Jersey mall, looking at socks.
It’s “How Can They Tell” by Parisian singer Isabelle Antena, who is described by Wikipedia as a “bossa nova and samba-inflected nu jazz and electropop artist”. I love the way the song opens in media res, as if Antena has just strode mid-sentence through a beaded curtain in some plush Mediterranean villa. To my ears, the song sounded straight out of the mid-to-late-80s “sophisti-pop” playbook purveyed by the likes of Sade, The Blow Monkeys and Swing Out Sister. But I had no idea if it was a lovingly accurate pastiche by a contemporary band wearing its influence on its sleeve, or a period piece. Turns out it’s from 1986, and I have some listening to do!
And it’s a sad note to end on this week, with news of the recent death, at just 54, of David Jolicoeur aka Trugoy the Dove, the brilliant rapper and songwriter who was a co-founder of the pioneering hip-hop group De La Soul. As someone who’d been a superfan of Steely Dan from a curiously young age—something I’ll dive into in a future letter, I’m sure—it was such a thrill to hear De La Soul’s “Eye Know”, which samples Dan’s “Peg” in such a smart, joyous, and even life-affirming way. If you want a lift for your day, just click on that above link and watch the video.
Thanks, as ever, for reading and subscribing. See you next week!
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Hey Ash... I appreciate the shout out for Trugoy. A loss, for sure. Your choice of "Eye Know" is a perfect example of his (and DLS's) genius.
It's a really worrying trend with Trugoy's passing that he's the latest rapper of that generation to pass away. Guru, Gift of Gab, Phife Dawg. Really shows how much we need to treasure the MCs of that era.
I remember pre-Boy In Da Corner my cousin asking me if I'd heard of "Dizzee Rascal". At first I thought it was an MC name that he made up, but then he played me a tape (yes, a tape) of Dizzee he recorded of pirate radio. I'd never heard a voice like it. It felt like a backlash to all the garage MC's of the time.
Also, trivia for I Luv U. The song is basically a companion piece to the track that inspired it; Jay Z's "Is That Your B*itch?". Dizzee wrote his bars to the beat of the Hov song, and if you listen to both, the subject matter (and its outlook on women) is very similar.