Head Space Daily Words...

As the drizzle falls, from the grey, overcast, London sky, Gilles Peterson’s show on 6Music oozes from the speaker of our DAB radio, filling the dining room with lush soulful sounds. Having been out on a work do last night, I am sitting on our IKEA rocking chair, with a slight hangover. I am not completely hanging, with a banging headache, or groaning on the settee, it is one of those where my brain is just a little slow on the uptake - nothing more, nothing less. So, as far as hangovers go, it is not unpleasant. With GP doing his thing, it is thoroughly enjoyable in fact. Gilles Peterson quite simply sums up my time in London. He has been with us in a musical sense for the past nineteen years, reflecting our lives with the sounds he has been playing, introducing us to new artists and old artists from the world over. That is why his show is called Worldwide. The track currently playing as I write, seemingly transports us to a Moroccan bazaar - the Uproot Andy remix of a piece called Sasda Vasda Raje Punjab by Mahendra Kapoor & Suresh Wadekar. Where else would music like this be played? This is Peterson for you; he can take you from the abstract to the sublime, from Lagos to Lebanon, Berlin to Brazil. Always interesting, always pushing on, going backwards to move forwards, never standing still, forever joining the dots. From the mid to late 90s, a fair posse of us would go to the Blue Note in Hoxton Square on Saturday nights, where Gilles would be a regular. This is before Hoxton and Shoreditch became what they are today and taxi drivers wouldn’t stop to pick up in the area!! He had a Sunday night show on KISS FM called Innervisions if my memory serves me right, with Patrick Forge having a show straight after. That is musical heaven!! There is a box in our spare room stuffed full of old cassette recordings of those Sunday nights, which were a great way to round off the weekend. We must transfer them to digital files. Tapes were great, weren’t they? Peterson feeds you musical knowledge, which can inform your taste. He digs deep and then gets it out there to be shared. He introduced me to Terry Callier, one of my all time favourite artists – a musical hero - who I saw play live five times. At the Southport Weekender, the memory of GP playing the Letta Mbulu track What is Wrong With Groovin’ followed with Moondance by Van Morrison, because there happened to be a full moon that night, lives on. Our last big New Year’s Eve, pre kids, as we entered 2001, was at the then recently opened Cargo in Shoreditch, where Peterson’s set was rammed full of classic tunes, from Rotary Connection's Black Gold Of The Sun, to Lenny Fontana presents Black Sun's Spread Love (see Daily Tune.) Music carries with it a vast amount of memories. A time, a place, people, mood, a moment, so that when you hear a certain track, you can be transported back to when you heard it. Gilles Peterson is a musical director, leading us through life’s journey…