4 stars
It's not every day a
free-jazz-punk-skronk-funk combo get to strut their stuff on a prime
time BBC TV sit-com. This, however, is exactly what happened on
December 7th 1982 when Rip Rig and Panic appeared on the
living room set of The Young Ones to perform their single, You're My
Kind of Climate, featuring Andrea (mum of Miquita) Oliver miming
vocals in place of absent teenage chanteuse Neneh Cherry while roadie
and performance poet Jock Scot similarly mimed trumpet.
Granted The Young Ones,
set in an anarchic student flat occupied by Rik Mayall, Ade
Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson was hardly Terry and
June, created as it was on the back of the burgeoning alternative
comedy boom. Set alongside The Young Ones' other musical guests who
included Madness, Motorhead and Dexy's Midnight Runners, however, Rip
Rig and Panic stood out like a mad uncle making a charming nuisance
of himself at a wedding. So much so, in fact that they were informed
that their unruly behaviour would guarantee that they wouldn't be
asked back onto BBC TV ever again. As these expanded reissues of Rip
Rig and Panic's trio of equally unruly albums prove, however, it was
the BBC's loss.
Here, after all, is one
of the great missing links in post-punk, a free-thinking collective
who tackled a melting pot of musical styles with a youthful
loose-knit abandon that suggested they were learning their chops as
they went, picking up some serious dance moves en route. Rip Rig's
founder members, guitarist and clarinettist Gareth Sager and drummer
Bruce Smith had both been in The Pop Group, Bristol's most intense
avant-provocateurs who similarly looked to funk and dub for
inspiration before imploding in 1981.
With singer Mark
Stewart forming Mark Stewart and The Maffia, other off-shoots as well
as Rip Rig and Panic included Maximum Joy and chart-bothering
instrumentalists Pigbag. With Sager and Smith hooking up with pianist
Mark Springer and bass player Sean Oliver, who Sager had first seen
busking, an invitation was sent out to Cherry, who had sung with The
Pop Group's fellow travellers, The Slits, and, with Smith, in the
On-u sound affiliated New Age Steppers. Cherry was also the
step-daughter of jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, which gave her hipster
kudos in abundance. #
The result of this
unholy alliance was wilder and more eclectic than anything their
peers were doing, and would sow the seeds for a multi-cultural stew
that would tentacle out through Massive Attack and Portishead, right
up to The Cherry Thing, Neneh Cherry's recent collaboration with
Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson's skronk trio The Thing, a band
who, it must be said, sound at times not unlike Rip, Rig and Panic.
Without Rip, Rig and
Panic too, remember, we may never have witnessed Neneh and Andi Dish
It Up, a six part cookery show hosted by Cherry and Andrea Oliver.
Presumably the BBC executives who dreamt up the show weren't aware of
Rip Rig and Panic's lifetime ban.
There were two
different strands to the Rip, Rig and Panic oeuvre. The first was a
kind of free-form party-time funk, pulsed either by squalling
saxophone or else Springer's singular piano, sometimes both at the
same time in a tug of love only anchored by Smith and Oliver's
rock-steady rhythm section. The second was a poppier if equally funky
song-based affair that put Cherry at its centre.
Both came with
scatologically wild titles, usually care of Sager, who also penned
the similarly scattershot lyrics.
If Storm the Reality
Asylum and Wilhelm Show Me The Diagram (Function of the Orgasm) were
riddled with counter-cultural references that sounded like
interpretative musical pamphlets in miniature, the Springer-led
Change Your Life sounded like a demented Vince Gauraldi jamming with
some just discovered African tribe on a Go! Team mash-up in waiting.
Just calling their debut album God was an audacious act of
provocation from the band. But then, given that Rip, Rig and Panic
had named themselves after a piece by jazz saxophonist Rahsaan Roland
Kirk, why the hell not?
God wasn't being put
out on some esoterically inclined micro-indie label after all. Like
its follow-ups, God was released on Virgin, which, while it still
held on to its own hippy roots via a welter of post-punk signings,
was undoubtedly a major.
I Am Cold features
You're My Kind of Climate and Storm The Reality Asylum, arguably R, R
and P's most commercial moments, and should've been squat-dance
classics in waiting, as the two 12” versions that feature among an
abundance of extras on these new editions make clear. Then along
comes a free wig-out bearing the title, Another Tampon Up The Arse of
Humanity, and any perceived attempt at crossover looks suddenly
unlikely.
With Don Cherry
guesting on all three albums, such a cross-generic libertine spirit
suggested that here was a new generation of British jazzers forged in
the image of the likes of pianist Keith Tippett (who Springer had
played with) and saxophonist Larry Stabbins, as well as other players
such as Barbasos-born trumpeter Harry Beckett and – especially –
pianist Chris McGregor and his Brotherhood of Breath, who, as emigres
from apartheid era South Africa, fused black and white sounds in a
way that was the most joyous of political statements in a more
accepting London scene. All of this would hit commercial pay-dirt a
couple of years later with Simon Booth and Larry Stabbins' Working
Week outfit who so encapsulated London's mid 1980s jazz dance scene,
but, despite surface similarities, such polo-necked cool was unlikely
to become Rip Rig and Panic's infinitely more sprawling
sensibilities.
If it was in live shows
that Rip Rig and Panic's unruly spirit was unleashed to the max, then
Attitude sounds the most honed, conventionally focused and 'produced'
of the three albums. This may somewhat conversely be to do with the
final album's increasing use of guest players, including drummer and
doyen of the London improv scene, Steve Noble, whilst also remaining
there was little in the way of compromise.
Following Attitude,
Springer went off to do his thing, while the rest of the band would
morph into Float Up CP, before Cherry eventually went mainstream via
her 1989 debut solo album, Raw Like Sushi, work with Massive Attack
and beyond. Sager went on to form Head, prior to more recent solo
releases on Scots indie label, Creeping Bent and sojourns this side
of the border with Jock Scot, The Nectarine No 9 and others.
Sean Oliver's passing
in 1990 ended the Rip Rig rhythm partnership with Smith, who went on
to join John Lydon's ever-fluctuating Public Image Limited project
for two albums in the mid-1980s, before signing up to the band again
when Lydon recently reformed PiL. Smith now divides his time between
PiL and the reformed Pop Group with Sager and Mark Stewart. Given
just how much things have come full circle in each member's waywardly
singular pursuits, perhaps now is the time for Rip, rig and Panic to
reconvene. Just imagine the glorious mess they could make!
The List, July 2013
ends
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