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Woofah 2 is OUT

Been too busy with, well, stuff to actually announce this on the blog! It’s huge, it’s fat, it’s great – Woofah 2. Now 64 pages of ad-free niceness – which is the equivalent of 100+ pages of most magazines. Small pages, mind. Please buy direct from us at www.woofahmag.com. We make a lot more money that way and we have to sell a few hundred to be able to do the next one! HUGE thanks to everyone who made it possible, especially droid for spending three months designing it and John Eden for spending even longer organising it, but also the brilliant band of writers, photographers and illustrators who have been so generous with their talent. It’s a rush.

Now on to issue three… soon come and already PACKED with great interviews!

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Grievous Angel on Radio One’s the Breezeblock


Yes folks it’s happened… Mary Ann Hobbs has played some of my tunes on her Breezeblock show on radio one. Following on from Blackdown playing my tune Lady Dub on his first show for Rinse a few weeks ago, this is a fantastic moment for me. She played Culture Killer early on in the show and Lady Dub right at the end. She tells me she dropped Lady Dub at Fabric and it “stopped people in their tracks!”. Which is cool!

(I was amused to see in the track listings that the label is down as Electrik Dagon – it’s actually Electrik Dragon, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was Electrik Dagon?)

Anyway, this is fab! You can listen again to the show here.

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off

so it was half-term this week in sheffield so I took the family on a trip to glasgow, broke my arm, came back and promptly got a stomach bug, hence the semi-random blogging today…

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Who’d you vote for?

DanceCrasher:
“Here are a few Reggae related ones that we check regularly, the emphasis tends to be less on older sounds and more on modern stuff… Let us know about any you check (not LP download sites though – we don’t deal with bootleggers) and just for a laugh, vote in the poll. We just hope that this doesn’t cause as many ructions as the previous article about messageboards 😉

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B15 project

Thanks to all who have sent in information on the B15 project. It’s fascinating! There is I think scope for an article on UB40’s contribution to UK (and indeed JA) reggae – apart from the fact that the first album (and it’s dub version) is fantastic, they are actually a proper reggae band that has always had a black UK and JA audience as well as a pop audience. And their cover of Red Red Wine is, perhaps surprisingly, genuinely really good when you separate its musical essence out from the schmaltzy pop side. Eden has a magnificent refix of it with a fab MC on which he put on one of his end-of-year mixes. (He won’t let me host it!)

Anyway, some Discogs info on B15. First, the label: “Oracabessa Records was set up by Ali Campbell and Brian Travers (both known as leadsinger and sax player of UB40, respectively). Working from their studios in Oracabessa (St. Mary, Jamaica) and Birmingham (United Kingdom), the record label is used to promote Jamaican dancehall and reggae artists, mixing their vocals with UK 2-Step and other dance music.” Which is fascinating, obviously. Now B15 themselves: “Angus Campbell & Ian Wallman came up with the B-15 Project name because of their Birmingham postcode (B15).” So the comments box massive are bang on and it looks like a cousin of Ali Campbell. Good work all round!