Anti Radar Funk #5: yours for 99p!

To mark official Record Store Day 2011, this afternoon we dropped another Type II funk bomb at a chazza in north London. Packed with vinyl-sourced curiosities and obscurities (see previous post for tracklist), this Pandora's box of delights could be yours for 99 English pence. Love me again, indeed!

Top 5: Eddie Bo

There should be no introduction needed to this fantastic Nola pianist, singer, songwriter, producer and arranger who sadly passed away in 2009, leaving a legacy that bears comparison with that other colossus of soul music, Curtis Mayfield. Like Mayfield, Eddie's work and influence stretches far beyond the records he sang on, encompassing fine compositions, productions and arrangements for the great Mary Jane Hooper and Johnny Adams among many others. Featuring funk, soul and R&B, our Top 5 Bo 45s is testament to the man's genius.

(Click on the title to hear the song on YouTube.)

5. Check Your Bucket, Bo Sound

4. From This Day On, Seven B

3. Hook and Sling – Part 1, Scram

2. Lover and a Friend (with Inez Cheatham), Seven B

1. I Found a Little Girl, At Last

Anti Radar Funk #5: Record Store Day special

It may be official Record Store Day on 16 April but don't think the Soulful Strut will be doing nothing other than purchasing LPs and 45s. Oh no. To mark a day devoted to vinyl records we'll be dropping, er, a cassette (well they don't have a Cassette Store Day, do they?) of vintage tunage at an unsuspecting charity shop in the capital.

Packed with 45-shaped obscurities (you know the score by now), this latest tape drop comes with a special new feature: after foisting several compilations of undisclosed music on London punters, from here on in we'll be posting the track list of each Anti Radar Funk mix on this blog a couple of days before they hit the shops. So without further ado, here are the soul, funk and R&B rarities that made it on to our 5th tape. Happy hunting.


Anti Radar Funk #5
Side A
Count Yates, At The Soul Inn, New Bag
Dale Serrano, Ou We Man, Stix
Josephine Taylor, Is It Worth A Chance, Twinight
Hank Ballard, I’m A Junkie For My Baby’s Love, Chess
Sheila Skipworth, Look What You Have Done To Me, Enyx
Bobby Hebb, Evil Woman, Crystal Ball
Flint Executives, Wheel Of Faite, Star Route
Rhetta Hughes, You’re Doing It With Her, Tetragrammaton
Philharmonics, I Need Need Your Love, Soulin
Loneliness, Ray Frazier & the Shades of Madness, Stanson
Nelson Sanders, This Love Is Here To Stay, La Beat
Banny Price, You Love Me Pretty Baby, Jewel
Nathaniel Mayer, I Had A Dream, Fortune
Big T Tyler, King Kong, Aladdin
Ann Cole, Each Day, Baton
Varetta Dillard (pictured above), That’s Why I Cry, RCA
Otis Rush, My Baby's a Good 'Un, Cobra
Floyd Dixon, Ooh Little Girl, Ebb
Eddie Bo, I Found A Little Girl, At Last

Side B
Trevor Dandy, Is There Any Love, Numero
Means of Persuasion, One Way Street, C&J
Juggy, Soul At Sunrise, Sue
Margie Joseph, One More Chance, Volt
Lee Moses, If Loving You Is a Crime (I'll Always Be Guilty), Dynamo
Mitch Mitchell & Gene King, Never Walk Out On You, Prix
Johnnie Mae Matthews, Got To Be On (The Case), Art
Catherine Howe, In the Hot Summer, Numero
Dorando, Didn’t I, Music City
Jean Plum, Look At The Boy, Hi
Betty Wright, Circle Of Heart Break, Alston
The Royal Esquires, Our Love Used to Be, Prix
Marvelle Hampton, I Know How It Feel, Piggylo
James Polk & The Brothers, Stick-To-It-Tive-Ness, Sonobeat
Arthur Ponder, Dr Strangelove, Capricorn

Digging Across America

For most of this winter you'd be forgiven for thinking that the only diggin' going on was the shovelling of snow – from the streets of London to downtown LA. But while the world lay under a blanket of white, the Soulful Strut took a trip across the United States, visiting independent record shops in search of funky nuggets squirrelled away until spring.

Taking a journey along the west coast, and from the deep south up to New York, we went looking for rare, unusual or just downright brilliant funk, soul, r'n'b and gospel music. Our quest took us to some great independent record shops, and we came away with some amazing spoils, the best of which we are going to reveal over the coming weeks...

Bop Street Records,
2220 NW Market St, Seattle, Washington - (206) 297-2232

There are a number of great record shops across Seattle, each with an impressive range of styles and stock (including, surprise surprise, grunge). Bop Street Records was one of our favourite spots, and we spent a whole afternoon diggin' there. Located in the city's funky Ballard neighbourhood, the shop is an Aladdin's cave of vinyl, superbly laid out, floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves of records.

Upon entering you're met with an impressive sight: the store recently relocated from around the corner and has been fitted with shelving so high it's reminiscent of the sliding ladders you'll find in the British library or, perhaps, the Batcave.




The afternoon we visited was unplanned; we were in the area and happened across the store by sheer luck. Finding the jaw-dropping array of vinyl in front of us, the rest of the day was immediately put on ice in favour of delving into the crates.

With so much variety it was hard to choose where to begin, but the helpful guys behind the counter offered a friendly welcome and were on hand to guide us around the shop (they even helped us look for some records too – thanks again Bob and Davin).

The large top floor is dedicated to boxes and boxes of 45s, and there are a couple of listening posts tucked away to sample the bounty.



We spent a frantic four hours at Bop and still didn't get through even half of the vinyl at our mercy. This is truly one of the biggest collections on the west coast, as well as a really cool place to dig (even Radiohead are known to pop in now and again to spend the night browsing for inspiration).


One of our finds from the day at Bop Street Records:

Ray Charles - Don't Set Me Free

We're currently busy assembling a killer mix of the best music we found during our trip, so watch this space!

Some other good stores we found in Seattle:
Silver Platters
Easy Street Records
Holy Cow Records
Sonic Boom Records

Anti Radar Funk #4

As our all-time favourite MC, Rakim, said: "It's been a long time/ I shouldn't have left you/ Without a dope beat to step to."

And so it was with the Soulful Strut's Anti Radar Funk cassettes, which have been gathering dust in our north London pad for months rather than pumping from the speakers of some stranger's 80s ghetto blaster. So today we put things right by depositing our fourth installment of every analogue fan's wet dream in a charity shop on our favourite London street, home to the best Italian restaurant in the capital as well as two of the finest clothes shops and, er, our dentist.

Finds: January 2011

Here are three recent discoveries that we (a) love (b) know nothing about and (c) can't find out much about on the web. The D Isaac Andrews is a private soul track out of Louisiana; the Oran Ruffin Jr is a cool little r'n'b groover with a hint of mambo and a sprinkling of jazz; and the Flesh and Blood is, I think, a 60s US garage band.

Only Built 4 Hyperlinks (Part 2)

Beat-mining the James Brown catalogue always produces great music, and in part two of our Only Built 4 Hyperlinks series we're looking at the rich seam of beats to be found with soul brother #1's stable of divas.

The irrepressible Marva Whitney and Lyn Collins - the female preacher featured on classics that underpinned pretty much the entire hip-hop and dance scenes of the 90s. From NWA to The 45 King's The 900 Number and Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock, they gifted us a legacy of funk in hip-hop that keeps us digging today.

But the person in focus here is Vicki Anderson, in her original guise as Myra Barnes (later to become Mrs Bobby Byrd), and a hard funk groove that has been used in several ways in hip-hop and therefore holds many formative golden-age memories.

Listen here

Message to the Soul Sisters opens with a rousing cry for the sisters to get together and show the brothers they can get down too. It kicks in with a pounding piano loop that riffs with hard, open drums and cries of "Yeah!". It's almost as if JB intentionally wrote it to feed the hungry samplers of 90s New York.

It didn't take long for the keen ears of DJ Premier to pick it up and rock it for Gang Starr's debut album on No More Mister Nice Guy, and then, from the west coast, Above the Law asked the question: "What's a radio cut when ya can't say shit and ya can't say fuck?" – is that Freedom Of Speech?

As Bobby Byrd's head-nodding piano groove rumbles on, it's the screeching horn solos that really grab the attention, as raw funk rains down from the sky and crashes into the brass section.

The energetic chaos builds and provides backing for one of our all-time favourite hip-hop tracks, Nile Kings's Dropping Bombs, using the power of those screeching horns to maximum raw effect. Old-school UK heads can even pick out the Principle's handiwork for Caveman's intro to Streetlife, a track that had me scouring crates for years to track down the source of that infectious baseline loop and sax lick.

Running with that gritty piano loop throughout, the track was perfect for hip-hop heads the day it was written and it still stands out today as a great track. A Soul Brother #1 Classic.