Super selections and wonderful words by Balearic Mike.

I went to a 50^th anniversary screening of Bruce Lee’s final movie at the Duke Of Yorks Cinema the other night, and I got in the mood by high-kicking around the living room to this…

Lalo Schifrin – Enter The Dragon – Warner Bros. Records 1973

In the `70s, before Star Wars came along, pretty much every kid in the world was into Bruce Lee and Kung Fu. It was THE LAW. This was despite the fact that we almost certainly hadn’t been able to see the films – I was approaching my 3<sup>rd</sup> birthday when Enter The Dragon, Bruce’s final film, was released – and would have instead had to make do with episodes of The Water Margin – if my dad would let me stay up late to watch it – and then Monkey for our Kung Fu fighting kicks!* I probably didn’t see Enter The Dragon until the `80s.

Lalo Schifrin’s score for the film is amazing. One of the finest of his many great soundtracks, this is a cinematic, funk and jazz-infused opus. Very much in the style of the Blaxploitation films of the time, and not dissimilar to his other epic score for Dirty Harry. It’s chock full of funky wah-wah guitar, tension-inducing strings, dramatic brass riffs, frantic percussion, and freaky synth squiggles, plus a few East Asian flourishes. The standout is of course main theme, with its samples of Bruce’s incredible battle cries dropped over a Moog-funk classic of the finest order.

I think I picked my original UK pressing up – either at work, in Manchester’s Vinyl Exchange, or in King Bee Records, Chorlton – in the mid `90s, and it has seen better days. But hell, who doesn’t have a few crackles and pops at our age? The cover art is still brilliant though.

*No David Carradine / Kung Fu for you? – Rob

I couldn’t make it to the recent Aficionado 25^th Birthday celebrations in Manchester, but I dug a few Balearic bangers in tribute…

Harry Baldi – I Can’t Kick This Feeling – WPBH 2013

This little beauty was released the summer I moved back to Brighton. It got hammered then, and still gets hammered to this day.

Harry Baldi is an alias of producer San Soda, and he had the incredibly clever – and Balearic – idea of basically re-creating a fucking awesome Moodymann record – I Can’t Kick This Feeling When It Hits – but instead of sampling Chic’s I Want Your Love – Harry uses Norma White & Brentford Disco Set’s Studio 1 reggae cover version instead. The result is fucking brilliant!

It’s a heavy, solid, building, club banger of a tune. Funky as fuck, yet deep and twisted, and a total anthem. It probably shouldn’t work, and there are places when you can really feel the chops and edits, but it all holds together and delivers by the bucket load. I included it in my Beach Bar Stage set from Electric Elephant in 2014, which is still one of my favourite gigs ever!

It’s a single sided 12”, but with 2 tracks, and I just listened to the other one for the first time. It’s a really good mash-up of several records, which produces a kind of dreamy, psychedelic, disco-house groove. It uses a big drum break from Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa, and a great female vocal sample which just loops ad-infinitum, adding to the trippy effect – “Totally awesome when we get through …”.

Note to self – check your records properly dipshit!

There’s a great etching in the runout groove as well – “The vinyl will never be sold and in fact it does not even exist -> These tracks will never be played at Panorama Bar, the crowd will definitely not go crazy for this”

I’ve said it many times, but Island Records, what a fucking label!

Jah Wobble, Jaki Liebezeit, Holger Czukay – How Much Are They? – Island Records 1981

The search for this incredible record began when Phil Mison brought back a copy of the “Look de Ibiza” KU promo video, a gift from Music For Dreams’ Kenneth Bager, from Copenhagen. Although we knew the majority of the tracks featured in the video, there were a couple of killer cuts which had us stumped, and this was one of them.

How Much Are They? can be heard in in the later half, as things are livening up musically. I think the scene it soundtracks is a young woman sunbathing on a yacht at sunset. It stood out immediately, since we recognised the piano part from the Spanish Balearic classic Es Impossible, No Puede Ser. 

The next clue came when we realised that there’s an almost identical piano riff in one of the tracks on Francois Kevorkian’s Snake Charmer, which then led us to Jah Wobble, Jaki Leibzeit, and Holger Czukay, who all play on that mini-LP. You bloody well earned your records back then!

Apparently, Francois asked to work with the trio, because he was so impressed with How Much Are They?* Unbeknown to our small Balearic gang, it had been a big record for David Mancuso at The Loft, as well as the clubs of Ibiza. It was thankfully pretty easy to find back in the `90s.

An amazing E.P., it sounds like it came out of Compass Point, while it was actually recorded between London and at Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne. The title track is a driving, heavy, percussive groove, drenched in dub effects, backspins, and warm synth pads. Holger’s French Horn – also ripe with reverb – those tinkling ivories, everything is powered along by Wobble’s bass. The rest is really good, reggae and Krautrock influenced post-punk, but this tune seems beamed down from outer space.

*Mr Wobble, who was still drinking back then, recounts a “wonderful” story about how he brought those Snake Charmer sessions to an end, by pissing on a rather expensive mixing desk – Rob

Abel – Aegean Sea – Noncollective 2011

This modern Balearic classic caused an immediate stir upon its arrival by being 2 things. It was really bloody great, and it was really hard to get hold of. If I remember rightly, you could only get one of the 300 copies pressed directly from Noncollective themselves.

Aegean Sea is a quite brilliant edit of an already really fantastic track. The original is by the band Smokey, titled We’re Flying High, from the album Changing All The Time. As I said, the original is already really great, but it changes midway through, and slows down into a kind of ballad, before returning to the original tempo at the end. What Abel does is make it work on the dancefloor, by removing the slow part, and doing some really great arranging – extending the intro to add to the atmosphere. He also seems to toughen up the drums, maybe with a little post production tinkering.

This is an absolutely majestic record. A sublime slice of yacht-rock, or Balearic blue-eyed soul. Channeling the spirit and sound of Laurel Canyon, you can imagine hippies dancing to this in some open-air Ibiza disco in the mid-70s. The record looks and sounds beautiful too. A gorgeous hand screen printed sleeve and an incredible pressing. The other 2 edits are also pretty good, though neither reach the heights of the A-side. The track, Belly Button, is some weird twisted European funk-rock, an edit of a band called Navel, their tune, Playback. The last one, 7th Of April, sounds like some obscure Supermax record. Could well be, but not one I own.

A great release, but pretty pricey now.

For more from Balearic Mike you can find him on both Facebook and Instagram – @balearicmike. 

Mike has a Mixcloud page packed with magnificent, magical, music, and you can catch him live on 1BTN, from 12 noon until 2 (UK time) every 1st and 3rd Friday.

You can also check out the super silk screen prints of “Balearic Wife” over at @jo_lambert_print