It Took Seconds

Five minutes and thirty-one seconds: I am away from my hard drive and working via my office laptop, hence I am limited by the music that is on said office laptop. So it’s astonishingly fortunate that “Finley’s Rainbow” by A Guy Called Gerald happened to be on there, is it not?

This was my favourite single of 1995 at the time, from AGCG’s remarkable Black Secret Technology album. It’s a version of Bob Marley’s “Sun Is Shining” with vocals by Finley Quaye (Tricky’s brother and for a brief time a minor pop star in his own right). Quaye sings the song very nicely indeed, but the record is also a showcase of Gerald Simpson’s indiosyncratic take on jungle: multiple layers of often light, skittering drum loops with the bass quite deep buried, and in this case a lush canopy of more melodic, hooky stuff on top though on a lot of BST the music is a lot darker and the drums carry the tunes. But the multiple drum layers give the music a gorgeous, sultry, thick sound that drum’n’bass was already moving away from in pursuit of starkness, cleanness.

I can hear echoes of Gerald’s approach in a few of the recent dubstep or post-dubstep or whatever-it-is tracks I’ve been hearing, like Untold’s lovely “Anaconda”, but even then the obsessively detailed thickness-but-lightness of the Gerald sound isn’t quite there.

What would your 5’31” track have been?