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BE MY FRIEND – a monthly portrait of one of Jackie’s pals.
This month – MARTIN OKASILI
Martin and me met through having the same music biz lawyer, the one and
only Simon Long (Collins Long). I don’t actually remember our first
meeting, and I haven’t spoiled this by asking Martin, but I do remember
receiving an early copy of an album he was making for WEA – an album
called THE INVISIBLE HISTORY OF THE BLACK CELT. The songs have great
names, like ALL I GOT TO DO IS STAY BLACK AND DIE, and SOMETIMES
NOTHING IS A REAL COOL HAND. He’s a great singer, songwriter and
guitarist and was also producing the album on a recording desk WEA
bought specially for him, so he had heaps of time to pay attention to
all the recording detailing that it can be painful to have to abandon
when you’re working to strict budgets.
Martin is a laconic Belfast man, with great warmth, total steel, and a
sexual magnetism that often destroys entire rooms. When he came to
record vocals on ELEGY FOR JOHNNY CASH (ALL THE RAGE/SONG FOR MY
MOTHER) he was due to join us in the fabulously eccentric bar the
Douglas Hotel in Bethesda, Wales, UK. We’d finished work for the day at
the studio and were sitting drinking as much as possible. When I say
we, I mean me, singer Deborah Greenwood, accordion player Spiros and
viola player Mikailis from Greece, co-producer David Wrench, studio
owner Laurie Gane, bass player Kevin Foster and multi-instrumentalist
Michael Cosgrave, plus a pub full of Welsh speaking old lads, assorted
twittish mountain climbers, vacant looking dogs waiting for salt and
vinegar crisps, and a bunch of men and women who I mistook for
depressed social workers, but who turned out to be Morris dancers
having a knees up without any discernible knee movement.
Suddenly the vaulted door swung open with a piercing ‘scree’ and Martin
Okasili swept in, dashed a purple cape from his shoulder, surveyed the
room from left to right, and in the sexiest of growls said “Ladies and
Gentlemen, the Chablis is on me”, at which point an entirely naked
teenaged Provencal girl staggered in with a crate of selected vintages
of the same.
Actually he just opened the door and said “hi”, but such is the way of
the Okasili that the preceding fantasy is the absolute effect he had
upon the room.
The photo here for BE MY FRIEND of me and Martin was taken by young
Magnum photographer (and wife of sax player Ed Jones/ THE MYSTERY OF
LOVE IS GREATER THAN THE MYSTERY OF DEATH)) Sissle Honore. Sissle’s
studio is in Bethnal Green, east London, and before the session we all
met up in a famous cafe (whose name escapes me) in the main street
there. Same thing: Sissle is a delightful and sexy blonde Dane and I am
a glamorous eccentric, but as soon as Martin sat down, young men
outside skidded to a halt on their Vespas, ran into the cafe and asked
Martin if they could stir his expresso.
“I don’t take sugar so there’s no need” he purred politely. It is said
of the famous advertising wanker Tim Bell (‘Labour isn’t working’) that
dogs would cross the street to be patted by him, such was his charm –
we were once together in Soho, me and Martin, when Tim Bell crossed the
street and asked Martin to pat his head.
“I’m sorry, I must decline – I don’t want my hand tainted by dubious
unguents” Martin smiled. Tim Bell fell into a dead faint in the road
with underlings frantically pulling his cock to try and revive him...
Martin’s work on my album FAIRYTALES FOR HARDMEN is exemplary: his
vocals on MAD AS THE MIST AND SNOW and OLD WEST AFRICAN SONG are
amongst the most poignant moments my oeuvre has to offer – when he gave
these performances at Milo studios in Hoxton, me and Jim the engineer
exchanged the sort of looks that are a rare preserve of the recording
environment - a look that says ‘this magical moment is why we got into
this terrible business in the first place’...
Martin once told me about a video for a song he was making in the south
of Spain. As he told me about it, it was already blending with some
archetypal yearning so deep within me that I couldn’t properly follow
what he was saying. My understanding of what he said is this – and this
has become a kind of Dali surrealist motif in my waking and sleeping
life – it returns to me maybe once a season, like a regulating part of
the soul, which only required strong enough imagery to get on with its
function and could thereby dispense with my clodhopping interventions:
There is a tower in Spain – it is a sort of religious tower that monks
live in. For some reason they have agreed to let Martin be filmed for a
video in and out of the tower (they probably just met him and said
collectively “oh YEAH!”). The tower is sand coloured and is by the sea.
It has a path up to the top which circles it. The path is exceptionally
dangerous and has no guard rail or any safety measure – you must simply
make your way up and down the path (it’s a single file path) – any slip
from half way up onwards and you are almost certainly dead, or wish you
were.
Martin has to proceed up and down the path for most of the day, with
lots of the filming being done from a helicopter which causes problems
– swirling, biting sandy dust. Going up is relatively easy, coming back
down is much less elegant and requires great concentration. The monks
have warned of this difficulty and don’t help by standing at the top
and the bottom showing great concern.
He didn’t explain to me the relationship between this stern visual idea
and the song it was to illustrate, but I notice that when I think of it
being me, instead of Martin, going up and down the pathway in alien
heat with a camera overhead, like one of the detested British army
choppers over Belfast, the song that comes to mind for me is an old
Doll By Doll song called FIGURE IT OUT:
‘people ask me what’s gone wrong
i say I don’t know
one day we will meet again
one day I will call your name
maybe in a crowded bar
maybe in an empty car
there’s one thing you can do -
figure it out on your own’
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