On safari in Lower Hutt

 

Meet and shake the other's hand, work together for the good of the land

Thursday music corner: Soul and R&B legend Curtis Mayfield (b. Chicago 1942, d. Georgia 1999) started his performing career as a teenager in The Roosters, which soon became The Impressions. He quickly matured into a talented performer and songwriter, with a burgeoning talent for socially conscious musical expression. His 1965 Impressions song People Get Ready was an enduring success, and following his 1970 departure from the Impressions his solo career expanded with successful album and single releases, displaying a particular talent for soundtrack albums. 

His 1972 Super Fly soundtrack album reached number one in the US pop charts and was certified Gold. Six of his albums topped the US R&B charts. He also wrote numerous hits for other artists, including two US chart-toppers in 1975: Let's Do It Again by the Staple Singers, and He Don't Love You (Like I Love You) by Tony Orlando & Dawn.

We Got To Have Peace was the third single from Mayfield's second studio album, Roots. It reached number 32 on the US R&B charts in 1972.

Curtis Mayfield - We Got To Have Peace (single edit, 1972)

See also:

Music: The Impressions - People Get Ready (1965)

Music: Curtis Mayfield - Freddie's Dead (1972)

Music: Staple Singers - Let's Do It Again (1975)

Your parents are people, and that's all we can be

Thursday music corner: American singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III was born in North Carolina in 1946, and since his self-titled debut album in 1970 he has released a large body of work: seven studio albums in the 1970s, four in the 1980s, four in the 1990s, five in the 2000s, four in the 2010s, and two so far in the current decade. In 2007 he worked with musician Joe Henry to create the score for Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, and in 2010 he won a Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy for his album High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project. He is the father of musicians Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche, and was previously married to folk singer Kate McGarrigle.

The poignant divorce ballad Your Mother and I appeared on the Richard Thompson-produced 1986 album More Love Songs, which was recorded in England, during a period when Wainwright lived there, and attained greater public recognition by appearing regularly on Jasper Carrott's TV show.

Loudon Wainwright III - Your Mother and I (1986)

See also:

Music: Loudon Wainwright III -  I Knew Your Mother (live, 2016)

Music: Loudon Wainwright III - Me & My Friend the Cat (1971)

Music: Kate McGarrigle, Rufus & Martha Wainwright - Talk To Me of Mendocino (live, 1999)

100th anniversary of the Embassy Theatre

Animated light-show, Embassy Theatre

 

The central role of drugs in the history of international trade

The popularisation of drug foods by Europeans often transformed their meanings, uses, and location of production. Tea and coffee gained initial favour in China and the Middle East because their caffeine contributed to the wakefulness necessary for religious rites. Muslim Sufi holy men and Buddhist priests popularised the drinks, which long were closely associated with religious observances. Cacao drinking was restricted to the Aztec theocracy and aristocracy in Mexico. In Europe all three beverages became tied to secular uses. Over time their class appeal changed: they began as aristocratic privilege, diffused to bourgeois pleasures, and eventually became mass delights and finally common necessities. The drugs that began as nourishment for spiritual contemplation became the sustenance of industrial workers. Along that path, the way they were consumed also changed. They were originally hot drinks with no sweeteners (the Aztecs added chili to cacao, the Arabs sometimes nutmeg or cardamom to coffee); later, so many additives were included that the original beverage was hardly discernible.

Once they gained acceptance and began creating fortunes for merchants and state treasuries, most of the drugs became respectable. In areas marginal to world trade, they sometimes served as money. Cacao beans in Central America, tobacco in West Africa, opium in southwest China, and tea bricks in Siberian Russia were currency. But usually the goal was to transmute them into gold or silver. At first they were foundations of mercantilist empires. The Spanish doted on chocolate because of their dominion over most of Latin America, which had a natural monopoly on cacao until traders later moved it to Africa. The British, who were the first Europeans to become coffee crazed, found tea more to the advantage of their trade plans in China and India. The French and Americans, oriented to Latin America, became coffee addicts.

These exotic drugs emerged from the outlaw underground to become central parts of the nascent bourgeois lifestyle in Europe. They went from the stuff of community, such as the tobacco smoked by Native Americans in council meetings or by West Africans in religious ceremonies, to the fuel of entrepreneurs and agitators for individual rights. Coffeehouses (which served other drinks as well) served as centres for trade and politicking in Europe. The first newspapers, men's clubs, and political parties were organised, and revolutions plotted, around tables serving coffee and tea. Smoking brought together men who created civil society amid the acrid clouds of tobacco. (Indeed, the coffeehouse was the world economy in miniature, an international emporium joining coffee from Java, Yemen, or the Americas, tea from China, sugar and rum from Africa's Atlantic islands or the Caribbean, and tobacco from North America or Brazil.)

The nineteenth century would popularise these goods so much that they lost their revolutionary appeal and their sense of social distinction. Tobacco descended from elegant snuff and fine cigars to vulgar chewing tobacco. Aristocratic Parisian dandies at Versailles who delicately took snuff would not have recognised that this was the same substance that US baseball players later called chaw and spit out on the sidelines or teenagers smoked furtively in school restrooms. Indeed, making it easier to consume tobacco while also working—as when cigarettes replaced the elaborate, heavy pipes that elites in the Middle East had favoured for nicotine delivery—could be crucial to expanding the market, while also changing the social image of smoking. Sugar was debased from extravagant culinary dessert masterpieces to a huge source of working-class calories in beverages to an industrial additive in something so prosaic as, say, ketchup; coffee and tea descended from the elegant salons to become popularised with instant coffee and iced tea in military rations and in cafeterias.

- Kenneth Pomeranz, The World That Trade Created, 2006 (via DelanceyPlace)w

Love is just the door that's locked and there's no key

Thursday music corner: The Assembly were a short-lived synth-pop side-project formed by ex-Depeche Mode and Yazoo member Vince Clarke and record engineer and producer Eric Radcliffe, who would later go on to own Blackwing Studios. 

Never Never was the group's only single, and featured the ex-Undertones lead singer Feargal Sharkey on vocals. The Clarke-penned synth ballad reached number four in the UK pop charts in November 1983. Clarke would go on to huge chart success with Andy Bell in Erasure, scoring 34 top 40 UK singles between 1986 and 2007. Sharkey would go on to a successful solo career with five UK top 40 hits, including the chart-topping A Good Heart in 1985, which reached number one in the UK, Ireland, Australia and Belgium.

The Assembly - Never Never (1983)

See also:

Music: Depeche Mode - New Life (1981)

Music: Erasure - A Little Respect (1988)

Music: Undertones - My Perfect Cousin (1980)