eddie piller on the acid jazz rare mod series
In 2009, mod celebrated it's 45th birthday of being in the public consciousness. Yes I know mod or modernism was around before then but in '64 mod was front page news. Acid Jazz brought out the first of it's 'Rare Mod' compilations, a trawl through mods back pages, breathing fresh air into the rarest of modernist grooves. It included a pile of lesser known tracks, brit soul, club r n'b, early psych and just straight forward mod beat!
since then there have been two other compilations, a series of superb 7" vinyl ep's for the purists and three books about some of the scene's faces.
america may have had it's pebbles and nuggets, we have acid jazz and we have rare mod!
acid jazz founder and mod about town eddie piller kindly answered some of my questions about the series that has had me and others readily grabbing their credit cards in the last few years, good news is there is more to come, including (rather tongue in cheek) a t-shirt.
how did the 'rare mod' series come about? how and who sourced the material for it?
the first edition was compiled by richard searle, the acid jazz a and r man - it was mainly licensed in from other labels and wasn't supposed to be an unreleased comp, just a rare mod-related one. Then we hooked up with Paul 'smiler' Anderson and Damian Jones who urged us to make the series more about actually unreleased material from acetates and old tapes that they had been turning up - if we found enough material to make an EP, we added to the EP series - which have all sold really really well - the thing i like about the RARE MOD series is that it takes in books as well - i think i feel a T shirt coming on!
was any research done talking to old mods? what they may have been listening to outside the mainstream?
it has been mainly tracking down people that were in bands and asking what they had lying around - considering it's almost 50 years ago, we thought we wouldn't really find mush but to be honest, ive been really surprised. We have EP's coming up from The Clique, Chris Farlowe and the British soul producer Graham Dee...Mark Lamarr even picked up an unreleased Kenny Bernard& The Wranglers album acetate that was never released at the time. We tracked down Kenny (now living in Norfolk) and he was literally amazed that it had turned up - as far as he was concerned the tapes had been stolen by a former manager in 1966 and never seen again. It's a brilliant slice of live mod soul, recorded at the Ad Lib club in soho in '65.
There's so many different interpretations of mod music that it can literally be what you want it to be!
how important do you think music was to the modernist movement? I sometimes get the feeling that it was diluted as the movement moved away from it's roots and got into the popular culture?
i tend not to try and rationalise how the music and culture fitted together as each generation reworks and reinterprets it - my dad always said that real mod music was late 1950s jazz - stuff like Tubby Hayes...he got out of it when r and b came in - so it's always different!
what was the most exciting find for the albums? or are you still looking for it? Is there a 'rare mod' holy grail? something maybe rumoured that nobody has heard?
hmm...well someone i know has been working on a forthcoming small faces box set (with a whole host of unheard material) which would be a winner for me - we did come across a couple of what we thought were unreleased Action tracks only to discover they'd been out in germany so we pulled them off - you never know what's out there...I mean, on the next EP we have a track from the Clique which was unheard for 45 years - they turned up this acetate and it's the only one there ever was...imagine what has actually been lost or destroyed over the years, it's mindblowing!
what should we be looking forward to in the next year from acid jazz, anymore 'rare mod'?
well, the kenny bernard and the wrangler's album is out in june and we are releasing a box set of the first 7 ep's. it's limited to 200 copies BUT the 7th EP comes in the box so you can add your own copies...looks very cool... Rare Mod 4 will be in the new year!
obviously apart from the compilations, there were the wonderful 7" eps and books, any plans to expand this? maybe a DVD of rare footage? a section on the modcast? the world is crying out for the definitive mod history book or documentary film.
the arse has dropped out of the DVD market so i doubt it - there was talk of re-releasing Africa Shakes a kookie teensploitation beat film shot in South Africa in the mid sixties...It's got some great township jazz in it and quite a bit of 'swinging' jo'burg (it might even be the Cape) but it was proving difficult to get the rights so we gave up in the end!
last question, some many years ago, when the Internet was in it's infancy and acid jazz had only just got a presence on it, I e-mailed you about the King Truman 12", when it wasn't commonly known or popular, and you said if you had a spare copy I could have had it, any chance this will ever see even a limited release, maybe as an exclusive record store day release?
do you know, I am asked that question on a weekly basis - Tosh Flood from the Duckworth Lewis Method was in here yesterday and he asked me too! I haven't actually had a spare copy for about 15 years but I have to say that the price has dropped back down again to about 50 quid, which is nice. I did talk to Paul Weller about maybe doing a limited run a few years back but in the end we decided to let it lie!
finally any chance you could pick half a dozen essential mod tracks for mini mixtape for the blog? with maybe a few comments about each? YouTube link's?
cant be arsed! It's hard enough work doing my own stuff to be honest!! you pick some!!
more about eddie piller, the modcast above
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