Then the whole place just erupted Mulvey reminisces

Then the whole place just erupted,” Mulvey reminisces.Hailing from Shepherd’s Bush and Ladbroke Grove respectively, Mulvey and Graham met in west London’s free-party scene, where they came under the spell of AJ, a DJ on pirate radio and sound systems. The music was informed by DJing, so it had to work in that environment.”With the first raw demos in the hands of record labels, Graham asked Mulvey to help, while AJ was starting to hang around, first offering tentative suggestions, then becoming part of the team. Mulvey’s dad was a session keyboardist for many Sixties groups, including The Rolling Stones, though Mulvey’s first loves were hardcore techno and heavy metal “I just rebelled against everything my dad was into. It was only later that I started going through his collection and realised he was right all the long.” Graham adds, “Now we go round to his dad’s house for jam sessions.”When the pair first met, Mulvey was part of a techno group that put on their own raves, while a 15-year-old Graham would pester him for a slot. The album encompasses party anthems, moody raps about dangerous streets, orchestrated instrumentals, soul and reggae Graham denies this happened by design “The motivation behind the music is to unify people. Our name comes from the concept that compassion is the tool that links people from all the tribes and cultures. How that manifests itself on the record is somewhat secondary.”Graham started out on his own, but soon found his music was narrow and one-dimensional “It was starting to sound a bit coffee table, a bit Zero 7.

“Border Crossing is a journey to question what hip hop is in this country. A lot of people are alienated by hip hop, and I wanted to change the way people think about it,” he says. AJ adds: “We’re opening doors and pushing envelopes, but we don’t want to be seen as spokesmen for hip hop.”If you had a checklist of genres of British black music, Ominous ticks almost of the boxes. The core trio are the turntablist AJ (Alex Angol), engineer Paul Mulvey and the guy with the vision, Seorais – the Scottish version of George – Graham, who, having DJed for 10 years, was desperate to make his own music.

It needn’t be like this: Ominous, the d?t album from the dance collective Border Crossing, provides a different, more real, kind of positivity, despite its title.
Border Crossing are a posse of hip-hop idealists who have fused the best of UK rap – think Roots Manuva – with a wide-screen vision last seen in the urban soundtracks of Massive Attack and Portishead. At a time when mass protests and closed streets welcome President Bush to the UK, the film makes for a romanticdistraction from fraught reality. On the next three Saturdays, we hope to delight your ears, engage your brain and play with your poodle.’Jazz from Hell’, BBC Radio 3, 6pm, 22, 29 Nov and 6 Dec. Richard Curtis’s latest rom-com, Love, Actually, portrays England, and especially London, as a twee village of kindly, introverted souls. “Where I hear smug, overwrought, paranoid, snobbish, facetious cold music of limitless ill grace,” Coleman wrote, “my friend hears magnificently intricate, humorous, bewitchingly sly, deeply honest music of ground-breaking originality and imagination.”I know what both of them mean. I’ve heard both points of view justified in Zappa’s canon, sometimes on the same album, sometimes even in the same song. It’s part of what made Zappa the infuriating paradox he was: a man whose political position somehow encompassed left- and right-wing ideas, a purveyor of Swiftian satire and mind-numbing knob gags, and the musician who navigated by the twin pole stars of Igor Stravinsky and Johnny “Guitar” Watson.It would be a clich?o say that there was only one Frank Zappa, especially as there were so many facets to what was an eclectic yet cohesive body of work.