Beseeching, heartbreaking, balladeering Thai popular song, with a new, post-war urban polish and sensibility, and measured display of western styles like jazz, tango, and rumba. Lovely stuff.

Swaying, haunting tangos from Turkey, from the twenties to the fifties, drenched in tears and booze, regret and recrimination.

‘Shidaiqu means ‘songs of the era’: a hybrid musical genre arising in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai in the late 1920s, blending traditional Chinese elements with western pop, jazz, blues, and Hollywood-inspired film soundtracks. It represented a musical and cultural merging that would go on to shape a golden age of Chinese popular song and film in the interwar period.
‘Waiting For Your Return ranges from early beginnings — like the 1927 recording Drizzle, often considered the first shidaiqu 78, composed by Li Jinhui and performed by his daughter Li Minghui — through to more polished examples in succeeding decades, by such stars as Bai Hong, Wu Yingyin, Yao Lee, and most prolifically Zhou Xuan.
‘The recordings here reach up until the shidaiqu’s local demise in the early 1950s, when the Chinese Communist Party denounced it as ‘yellow music’, outlawing nightclubs and the manufacture of pop music, and destroying western-style instruments. At this point many of these singers decamped to Hong Kong, enjoying further success throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.’

Haunting, ravishing blends of western art song, blues and jazz with traditional and classical Japanese music. Wonderful.

‘Back in the early ‘90s, whenever the pirate radio MC announced ‘a pause for the cause’, I usually pressed pause on my cassette recorder. That’s something I would regret years later, when ad breaks had become cherished mementos of the hardcore rave era. Luckily, back in the day I often left the tape running while I went off to do something else. So a fair number of ad breaks got captured accidentally for my later delectation. Not nearly enough, though. So in recent years I started combing through the immense number of pirate radio sets archived on the internet.
‘A few of my original unintended ‘saves’ and latterday ‘finds’ are included in this wonderful collection, focusing on the audio equivalent of the rave flyer: MCs breathlessly hyping a club night or upcoming rave, listing the lineup of deejays and MCs, boasting about hi-tech attractions like lasers and projections, mentioning prices and nearest landmarks to the venue, and occasionally promising ‘clean toilets’ and ‘tight but polite security’. Some of these ads are etched into my brain as lividly as the classic hardcore and jungle tunes of that time. Names of deejays ring out like mythological figures: Shaggy & Breeze, Kieran the Herbalist, Tinrib, Food Junkie…
‘These ads capture the hustling energy of an underground micro-economy; but most of all they are hard hits of pure nostalgic pleasure, amusing and thrilling through their blend of period charm, endearing amateurism, and contagiously manic excitement about rave music’s forward-surge into an unknown future. The best of these ads give me a memory-rush to rival the top tunes and MC routines of the era’ (Simon Reynolds).

Stunning piano improvisations — mostly solo, though peppered with tombak, violin, and scraps of poetry — using his own tuning system, recorded for Iranian national radio between 1956-1965.

Digging deep in archives from West Virginia University to the British Library — across seven decades, 1934-2001 — in search of versions of the chilling ballad of Lamkin, about the grisly murder of a woman and her small child.

Archivist David Goren dialling across raucous soca and kompas, Grenadian election news and Haitian funeral announcements, ads for Jamaican patty shops and spiritual healers, broadcasts in Turkish, Orthodox and Sephardic Jewish pirates… the rough and tumble of it all animated by the coronavirus pandemic, George Floyd, the US election, and general tumult and unease of these times.

The first volume in a two-part collection of pirate radio adverts & idents, assembled from home recordings of London stations made between 1984 & 1993.