Transglobal Underground - Classic Or Dud?

My copy of the first album is pretty scratchy... time to replace on CD, methinks.

"this is the army of forgotten souls"

music... it is the universal language. but can it manage to replace the damage done by those people in power, and save the world in it's 11th hour.

Christ I hated them even then. Never liked that house-music-with-middle-east-samples area (well that Coldcut track was good of course but not the hippyness of the TGU style thing).

I will try Select-A-Disc on my way to the FAP.

At the Phoenix Festival 1996 I went to see Transglobal Underground entirely due to the fact that I had confused them with Global Communication, from whom I'd heard a single track on a Select cassette. Obviously realised my mistake early on, but no regrets, they were a perfect band to come across without any expectations, just how joyful and welcoming it felt in that tent, at one point a group of chanting Indian women arrived and made their way through the crowd as they sang, I think it was the intro to Temple Head.

It didn't lead to any great fandom or anything, but I got their first LP and also liked that, if not quite as much as hoped, not sure if I've heard it since 2000 or so.

Anyway today I remembered they existed and put on Temple Head, and you know what? Maybe it hadn't "aged well" in 2006 but it sounds amazing to these ears in 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YANW7wef-po

The structure is odd, ABABCA with C being the bit with vocals, this is the same structure used by dance bands in the 1930s. And it seems according to Discogs this is the only rap this guy ever released. It's very much of its time (1991) in some ways "the red and the yellow, the orange and the pink" but really works in the context of the track.

Also Natacha Atlas started out in Transglobal Underground, so there's that.

So I'm saying "classic", sorry 2006 ILM.

Temple Head is on the recent Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs "Fell From The Sun" compilation. It's nice to see it alongside perhaps more typically credible faire, although it is historically correct to say that the same people (e.g. me and my friends and presumably Bob and Pete) would have listened those tracks without artificial divisions.

It was a huge Whirl-Y-Gig anthem at the time, and along with Joi and Astralasia they were one of the house bands, may well still be. "Dodgy raps" were a feature of quite a few of the big tracks there. As it happens I think I blagged the 1993 Phoenix Festical as a 'steward' for the Whirl-y tent...

I coined a new word - festical.