Honest Jon's
278 Portobello Road
London
W10 5TE
England

Monday-Saturday 10 till 6; Sunday 11 till 5

Honest Jon's
Unit 115
Lower Stable Street
Coal Drops Yard
London
N1C 4DR

Monday-Saturday 11 till 6; Sunday 11 till 5

+44(0)208 969 9822 mail@honestjons.com

Established 1974.

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Kenny Knots

Watch How The People Dancing

Honest Jon's Records

Actress

Paint, Straw And Bubbles

Honest Jon's Records

Three exclusives trailering the Splazsh album, including a carnivalesque house banger from Zomby. Out Detroit, UK bass science and UK funky, cold wave and Kraftwerk… a London thing, mongrel and dashing.

Elmore Judd, Bullion

Petrol Laughs EP

Honest Jon's Records

Cold-sweat compounds of art-funk, baglama high-life, horrorama, yacht.

Tshetsha Boys

EP

Honest Jon's Records

Tiyiselani Vomaseve

EP

Honest Jon's Records

Two EPs of storming, squinty Shangaan Electro to herald the European tour of Tiyiselani, the Tshetshas and producer Dog, in the summer of 2011.

Oni Ayhun, Anthony Shake Shakir

Meet Shangaan Electro And BBC

Honest Jon's Records

Fiercely brilliant, slashing, whooping dance music from Oni — all-original, no samples — and a stonking Detroit thumper from the master.

Actress

Rainy Dub

Honest Jon's Records

The implacable, alien Son Of Sleng Teng — a beast of of a tune, lumbering and snuffling, one-of-a-kind — bleeping, buzzing, knocking, dripping, reverberating… and unresolved in nine minutes.

Pinch And Shackleton

Boracay Drift, with Morphosis Remix

Honest Jon's Records

Extra to the LP, with a magnificent, epic, head-scrambling remix, more spaced and spooked than the original. Shackleton’s dream liturgy fully unfolds — an eerie, garbled sublimity, a kind of black-magic plainsong.

Actress

Meets Shangaan Electro

Honest Jon's Records

An immersive, slashing, ecstatic thumper, just about getting Mars on the radio; and a kind of unhinged marimba and thumb-piano variation, grubbing around manically in half-memories of African polyrhythm.

Demdike Stare, Hype Williams

Meet Shangaan Electro

Honest Jon's Records

Moritz Von Oswald Trio

Blue

Honest Jon's Records

Meditative, absorbing dance music in true Moritz style — at times seemingly transfixed by its own elements, and minimal almost to vanishing-point, but quickly back ticking, kicking and amassing.

Kassem Mosse / Simone White

Three Versions

Honest Jon's Records

Tapes Meets The Drums Of Wareika Hill Sounds

Datura Mystic

Honest Jon's Records

This started out a couple of years ago as a grounation drumming session above the old headquarters of the Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, in Wareika Hill, Kingston, JA. Four funde, a repeta and a bass drum. Back in London, contributing flute and guitar, Kenrick Diggory unbottled the deep rootical psychedelia and sheer awe of Hunting — the Keith-Hudson-versus-Count-Ossie wonder of the world — and Tapes added electronics, a shot of Drum Song… and a giddily intense binghi dub.

Kassem Mosse

Chilazon

Honest Jon's Records

Pure worries from Leipzig — three club burners steeped in Detroit traditions, distilling the explorations in collective, nervy hypnosis of KM live sets. As the music slowly unfurls, there he is at every turn, subtly tweaking its parameters, redistributing its weight, pricking its grooves into a state of utterly infectious perpetual movement.
The two visions of Chilazon track opposite pathways: the first is twelve minutes of gorgeous, dubwise, aquatic techno, spattered with kicks and razor-sharp hi-hats, and smeared with ghostly echoes; then a terse mesh of broken drums, escalating to a quiet yet feverishly intense peak. Lanthanum is calligraphic swordplay, its toms and bass stabs warily circling one another in a graceful steppers’ dance, spaced-out and fathoms-deep.

Madteo

Str8 Crooked

Honest Jon's Records

Three brilliant re-routings of Detroit machine funk — Moodymann in particular — into deep mid-Atlantic co-minglings with raw, old-school hiphop and house.
Str8 Crooked is clattering, chugging jack, holding something like Paisley soul under the water; Build Back Better Sweatshops is more driving, riven with breakdowns and horror-show vocal samples. With an uptempo downbeat which nonetheless sounds like a tolling bell, the epic, immersive, sixteen-minutes-plus Episcopi Vagantes pulls off the deadly combination of a kind of stifled, timeworn, melodic wistfulness and percussively restless, passing-through urgency.
This is killer dance music, run through with swingeing, parping bass and ruff b-boy drum-machine rhythms: encrusted and detailed, mangled and nervy, but intensely hard-grooving; wired with punk insouciance, edginess, and free spirit.
Bim bim bim.

Ricardo Villalobos - Max Loderbauer, Peverelist

Meet Tshetsha Boys

Honest Jon's Records

A bobbing, minimal groover from the Berlin corner, dug-in and funked-up over ten minutes; and icily original, top-dog work from Pev, tethered between a kind of arrested Highlife and a Detroit breakout.

Shackleton

The Majestic Yes

Honest Jon's Records

Killer EP. Next-level Shackleton.
Taking off from Beaugars Seck’s foundational sabar drum rhythms — recorded by Sam in Dakar in February 2020 — Shackleton has constructed a trio of intricately layered, luminous, enchanted, epic excursions. The second is more dazzled and meandering, with jellied bass, insectile detail, and discombobulated jabbering; the third is more liquid, fleet of foot, and psychedelic, with a grooving b-line and funky keyboard stabs, scrambled eastern strings and hypnotic vocalese.
The harmonium in The Overwhelming Yes sounds like Nico blowing in chillily from up the desert shore.
The overall mood is wondrous, twinkling with light, onwards-and-upwards; an uncanny, dubwise mix of the ancient and the futuristic.
Mark Ernestus’ Version is stripped, trepidatious, mystical, and stranger still, with just a snatch of the original melody, extra distortion and delay, and crystal-clear drum sound.

So… Twenty minutes of startlingly original music, with Shackleton the maestro at the top of his game, and a characteristically evilous dub by Mark Ernestus. Mastered by Rashad Becker; handsomely sleeved.
Sick to the nth. Love 4 Ever.

Lamin Fofana

Lamin Fofana & the Doudou Ndiaye Rose Family

Honest Jon's Records

Epic, grooving, extravagantly creative, perfectly attuned blends of complex mbalax drumming, field recordings, thumping kick-drum, and cosmic, bubbling, jamming synths and electronics.
The opening is suitably liminal, haunted by a diachronic sense of times past, present, and to come: ancestral ghosts, scratched playback, scraps of old recordings, voices strangulated or just out of range; puttering drums; futuristic, kosmische keys. Part II picks up the pace; III gives the drummers some, and heightens the atmosphere of enchantment. Jon Hassell’s Fourth World music courses through a kind of Dream Theory In Dakar.
Toco SOS, the second side, is a thumping, throbbing, mesmeric future-classic; perfect for fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n on the Autobahn… in a spacecraft. Expert hand percussion, call-and-response singing, bin-trembling foot-drum, spaceways keys. Sleekly funky as prime Popol Vuh.
Both sides range expansively by way of Berlin, where Lamin resided for a few years: you can hear something of T++’s brilliant, landmark HJ record on the A, and elements of Mark Ernestus’ crucial Ndagga project, on the B.
Half an hour of stunning music; in a beautiful sleeve, with mirror lettering, and an intricate spot-gloss rendition of salt crystals, laid over a photograph of the salt mines at Lac Rose, outside Dakar.

Trembling Bells

New Year's Eve's The Loneliest Night Of The Year

Honest Jon's Records

A terrific, bountiful seasonal single — with Bonnie Prince Billy in his cups on one side, and Mike Heron from The Incredible String Band on the other, with a Boxing Day ghost story. Beautifully sleeved, limited.

The Famous Ward Singers

I'm Getting Richer

Honest Jon's Records

A scorcher from the golden age of gospel, via its cardinal label.
From 1960, during the family’s second decade with Savoy, featuring Gertrude Ward, Christine Jackson, Mildred Means and Vermettya Royster — and Clara, totally riveting and in-your-face with evangelistic fervour and raw soul.
Plus a rambunctious, floor-filling Wade In The Water, by Jessy Dixon and his Singers.
Handsomely sleeved (showing a contemporary but slightly different Wards lineup).

Edith Moreno

Get Ready For Judgement Day

Honest Jon's Records

Red hot gospel soul from 1983. Only ever issued as a test white-label; never before released commercially.
Plus some classic early-eighties soul vibes on the flip, as Helen Hollins — from James Cleveland’s Southern California Community Choir— magnificently busts loose Burt Bacharach, strutting resplendently onto the dancefloor with her dad, husband and two daughters Alicia and Francheasca in glorious cahoots.
Lovely spot-glossed sleeve.
Devilishly limited, all three of our Savoy singles.

Candi Staton

Who's Hurting Now?

Honest Jon's Records

‘Early contender for 2009’s album of the year. Yes, already’ (Mojo). ‘The sheer soul in her voice is revolutionary’ (NME).**** The Independent, The Times. ‘**** a masterclass in gritty southern soul’ (Daily Mail).

Moondog

More Moondog

Honest Jon's Records

Gwigwi Mrwebi

Mbaqanga

Honest Jon's Records

Beautiful, insurgent, fabulously danceable jazz music from South Africa, flowing out of the penny-whistle kwela bands of the 1950s. (Kwela means ‘get moving’, in Xhosa.)
Bra Gwigwi played alto and clarinet alongside Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeketsi in The Jazz Dazzlers; also in The Jazz Maniacs and The Harlem Swingsters. He came to the UK from Johannesburg as an actor and clarinettist in King Kong — a musical about a Zulu boxer — which opened in London in February 1961.
Recording in January 1967, at Dennis Duerden’s Transcription Centre, he is joined here by Dudu Pukwana, Chris McGregor, Laurie Allan, and Ronnie Beer, all from The Blue Notes. Ladbroke Grove legend, and mainstay of our London Is The Place For Me series, Coleridge Goode plays double bass.

No less than sixteen shots of jubilant, jump-up mbaqanga. Check the Ethiopian vibe of Mra (which became core repertoire of The Brotherhood of Breath). Listen to Nyusamkhaya, and try to get it out of your head. Impossible.
Lovely notes by Steve Beresford, too.

‘The South African folk music that makes people glad to be alive!’

Trembling Bells

The Constant Pageant

Honest Jon's Records

‘New levels of excellence… a poetic incantation of British identity far brighter than Michael Gove’s proposed GCSE history syllabus *****’ (The Sunday Times). ‘Magnificent ****’ (The Guardian).

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