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Charlie Gillett im Radio: The Sound of the World
"Some of my biggest hits have started with a Ping Pong"
Interview mit World Music DJ Charlie Gillett |
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"Radio Ping Pong" - was steckt dahinter? Der Studiogast bringt eine Handvoll CDs mit und kann in der Sendung spielen, was er will - die Auswahl wird erst live on air bekannt. Charlie Gillett wählt dazu jeweils ein passendes Stück aus der eigenen globalen Plattenkiste aus: Es entsteht ein spannendes musikalisches Wechselspiel, das den Charakter seiner Sendungen prägt, viele neue Klänge ins Radio bringt und auch die jährlichen "World"-Alben inspiriert...
HT: Radio Ping-Pong: I don’t really understand what the rules are.
CG: There are very few. The basic principles are: you come in, I say to you don’t tell me what you are going to play, just bring in a dozen records, and I’ve got my box here, you get first choice, and you play whatever you want to play, for whatever reason, and out of my box I play something that feels like it’s going to be good against it.
| WORLD 2004 (Doppel-CD) |
World 2004
32 Artists from 24 Countries
(compiled by Charlie Gillett)
With Chango Spasiuk, Ojos de Brujo, Bucovina Club, Lo'Jo, 17 Hippies, Carla Bruni, Souad Massi, Chava Alberstein, Gianmaria Testa, Simon Diaz, Katia Guerreiro, Khaled, Dona Rosa, Abyssinia Infinite,...
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I know you’re coming in, so I have slightly tailored what I have brought in bearing in mind what I think you might play, I don’t want to overlap you exactly, but still I want to be comfortable with what you’re doing and do something that sounds like a coherent show. If I’ve got someone who’s a bit of a jazz musician, then the things I am going to play will relate to that, whereas if it’s someone from New Zealand, as I had recently with the two members of the Maori group Wai, then that show became virtually everything from New Zealand.
The ones I was playing were quite commercial things: I played a rap record from New Zealand, and a reggae record from New Zealand, while they were playing the more authentic Maori things, so it all kind of hangs together. So that’s it, there are no rules beyond that.
HT: Well I suppose it just means that lots of nice records get played...
CG: ...and I discover things that I wouldn’t otherwise know. I am needing help in every way, you know, these records are come in an are sitting around on the floor, and there is nothing about that record sitting there that makes me think I want to play it, so I don’t. But now you come in and you play it and I go Ah! and I go back home and listen and think yeah, this is good. Some of my biggest hits, the ones I have played over and over, have started with a Ping Pong.
HT: What would somebody have to do to become a Ping Pong guest?
CG: That’s a good question, because there is no system. Most of the time it’s because I like what they do, whether they are a writer, artist, or a promoter. Occasionally, it is a blatant promotion of a particular event, this year there was one called La Linea, where a promoter called Andy Wood was bringing in artists from the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world, so he was a guest about two weeks before that started, and everything he played was by an artist who was going to be in this festival. Similarly I had the guy who co-ordinated an event called X-Bloc Re-union at the Barbican, which featured musicians from countries which were formally part of the communist bloc. He’s called Bryn Ormrod, who curates two or three of these themed events every year. He also does one called Beyond Nashville which is, as you can tell, an alternate country type thing.So that kind of Ping Pong is very specific to a particular event, but more often, its just somebody whose music I like, or a journalist where I like the range of what he or she writes about. But I’ve discovered there are very few in Britain I can invite. When I started I expected to invite quite a few journalists where my own agenda was the hope that once they heard some of this stuff that I was playing back to them, their lives would change, they would think, Ah, I get this. But it never happens, you know, these people who are into rock, they are just into rock, they cannot hear outside it, they sort of sit there saying this is quite nice, but they haven’t got the slightest curiosity to go and hear it again or to pursue it.
HT: Well, I think I would be the same the other way round, you know, I am not really into rock music and so I would just say oh yeah that’s alright, but I am not going to listen to it again...
CG: ...which is I suppose you could say is how I am, I do have a block about all these groups that just play the same instruments in the same way as they were played by the Beatles and Byrds back in the sixties. But I do sometimes like groups who sing in English, like The Be Good Tanyas, a Canadian trio, who are not exactly rock...
HT: You like them, don’t you?
CG: I think they are fantastic, I just love their attitude, I love the sound, they’re using mandolin, violin, guitar…instruments of traditional American music you could say, but they’re writing songs today or they’re singing songs written by friends of theirs which I really like.
HT: They are on World 2003 aren’t they?
CG: Yes.
HT: What kind of music is it then?
CG: Well it really doesn’t have a name, it is the instruments, you know the film Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Well it’s those instruments, but they don’t sound like that, and on this song that I’ve got on here, as I say in the sleeve note, I was looking at the lyrics on their album, and when it gets to this song it says instrumental, well it isn’t instrumental, she is singing all the way through, and when The Be Good Tanyas were guests on my show, I asked the singer Frazey Ford about it, and she looked a bit sheepish, and said ‘when I sang it I wasn’t really singing the words and by the time I finished, no-one could work out what I was saying most of the time’. It’s just great that the mood that it generates is there even though you don’t get the words, which is how it is for all these other songs which are on there which are in languages I don’t understand anyway. I enjoyed the joke of that.
HT: Is the foreign language aspect part of the appeal for you with music from other countries?
CG: I think it might be in the sense that somewhere in the early eighties, I really began to get a sense that every rhyme and every thought that anybody could ever have had been put into a song that I’d heard by now, you know I was forty by then and...
HT: You felt you were hearing one cliché after another?
CG: Well, something isn’t a cliché the first time you do it, but by the time you have heard it over and over... so there was definitely a sense in a way that it was getting harder and harder for somebody to sing a song that really made my ears prick up, although really what it is, the words really are actually a device for the singer to sound heartfelt and convey an emotion, whether it’s in English or not, that’s what it’s all about. So at some point I just crossed that line, where I thought, if I hear Khaled singing, I don’t know what he is singing about, it’s the way his voice reaches inside you and touches you.
When I first heard Little Richard back in the fifties, I probably only heard or understood about one in every ten words because he was just yabbing, and it’s quite a surprise after a while when you realise he is actually singing English, it’s just the way he’s singing (sings) It’s SaturdaynightandIjustgotpaidfoolaboutmoneydon’ttrytosave and you can’t tell where one word finishes and the next starts. You hear it again and again, and gradually you finally string a sentence together and you’ve got it! But that first time you hear it, it’s just a roar...
HT: When Khaled sings in Arabic it’s beautiful, isn’t it?
CG: Yes and even when he sings in French, like on Aïcha. But Arabic: that was the hardest thing for me, or one of the hardest. I found it dissonant for a long time, and it was the music of West Africa, Youssou N’Dour, Salif Keita, those people, I got into their music, and I actually went out to West Africa and, hearing music on the radio, you could hear Algerian, Moroccan radio in Senegal, and I could suddenly hear how similar it was, and then.. I had no problem.
These days the problem I would have would be with languages like Japanese or Chinese, I can’t quite get my head into that yet, but, inch by inch I may get there...
HT: It’s a bit difficult to hear the emotion coming out isn’t it?
CG:...It sounds a bit quaint.
HT: What about German? Have you heard much music in German?
CG: German language... Well the group that I like, 17 Hippies, they don’t often sing in German, they sing in English, French and German. Who do I like in German? What are they called? There is a really good reggae group with three E’s in the middle of the name...
HT: It actually sounds not bad German in reggae does it?
CG: Yes, it can work... what is this group called? Seeed. But of all the European countries it’s the language where there has been the least music being sent to me, put it that way. Most people who are singing in German are singing in pretty conventional pop formats.
HT: I was going to ask you about the order of your records, but you have kind of talked about that. It could be deemed to be slightly random and unpredictable, couldn’t it?
CG: Unpredictable I don’t mind, I would hate to think it sounded random. I am coming out of Gary Crowley’s show, which is a rock show, so I have got it in mind, if I can try and hang on to those people for about three or four records, that would be quite nice, but there is news in between, so I imagine the majority of them are just turning off. But it’s funny, from the feedback, I can tell that there are people who have been listening to him. He by the way, I should explain, is probably in his early forties, and he is besotted with British sixties music, in other words, music from before his own time, and he loves all the bands of today which sound a bit like that, which is exactly what I can’t really handle.The fact that so many British indie guitar groups sound to me like they’re trampling the same field that was done so well by the Stones, The Yardbirds and the Beatles in the Sixties, and I cannot understand people still going round and round the same thing, you know, the guitars playing the same way, the drums playing the same way. I have just done World 2003, and actually it’s the rockiest record (it’s the fourth in a series), and there are probably ten or eleven groups who could be called rock groups from Spain, from Russia, from all over the place, but all of them are completely shaking up the formula, none of them are just playing this basic guitar, bass and drums, they are bringing in accordions, or horn sections or they are playing really interesting rhythms. There is a group from St. Petersburg, Markscheider Kunst...
HT: Why is their name German?
CG: I don’t know why they chose a German name. But they sound like Cumbia band from Columbia on the track that I’ve got on here, although on other tracks they sound more African, and they have got a good Congolese singer in the group who sings lead on some of the tracks. Spain has just thrown the whole rock thing up in the air and it has all come down in a different order, they’ve got a flamenco feel in there. So what is holding everybody up? But Terry Hall and Mushtaq.. do you know Terry Hall? he is the guy who used to sing with the Specials and Fun Boy Three. Fun Boy Three broke up in around 1983, and really Terry Hall hasn’t done anything worthwhile for about twenty years, and he has just made a really good record. So there you go, it can be done, and I am hoping that he will lead people on. I have dedicated this record to Joe Strummer, his last album was really exploring all this kind of thing, bits of reggae and lovely violin, so he was wandering off to the side.. but when he did his gigs I heard that people were shouting for Clash numbers, they weren’t really interested in what he was doing himself, what he wanted to do... |
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