A Guy Called Gerald and jungle’s Annus mirabilis
Black Secret Technology, Cybotron, Lauren Flax, Frankie B and Leon Keïta
One of the obviously great things about having a newsletter is being able to write what you like, when you like. This week, I was inspired to explore A Guy Called Gerald’s classic Black Secret Technology album after meeting up with Danny Spencer - aka Danny Mekanik, half of Soul Mekanik and Sure Is Pure - in Sitges, to talk about his past in chart-bothering rave act Candy Flip, them of Strawberry Fields Forever fame.
Danny, unbeknownst to me, was one of the first people in the UK to make house music, when he was on a music production course in Manchester in the mid 80s with Graham Massey, later of 808 State, and Gerald Simpson, aka A Guy Called Gerald. Danny and Gerald would take their demos down to Stu Allan, at Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio, who would introduce them as being by “a guy called Gerald from Hulme” and “a guy called Danny from Stoke”. And so history was made.
Anyway, this reminded me that I have been trying to write about Black Secret Technology for someone for ages, without any luck. So I thought it was about time to write about it for myself. I hope you enjoy it.
In Praise of A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology
1995 was a landmark year for jungle: Goldie released Timeless, his classic debut album, which, more than any other release, helped to edge jungle into the mainstream; jump up was starting to take flight, with the release of tracks like DJ Zinc’s Ready Or Not, and Alex Reese unleashed Pulp Fiction, cementing the 2-step beat. Among this kind of competition it was perhaps not entirely unexpected that Black Secret Technology, A Guy Called Gerald’s classic long player, would get slightly overlooked. The album’s mastering was off, giving it a rather murky edge; it was released on Gerald’s own Juice Box records, rather than one of the more renowned jungle labels; and it was Gerald’s fourth studio album, which probably didn’t help in a musical scene obsessed by novelty.
The fact that the record was by A Guy Called Gerald, aka Mancunian producer Gerald Simpson, probably didn’t help much either. This sounds harsh, for an artist that has done so much for British music - of which more later - helping to pioneer the UK’s acid house sound since his first release in 1988. But A Guy Called Gerald has long been misunderstood. Even now, he is largely seen as the Voodoo Ray guy, after his classic 1988 single. Which, in a way, is fair enough, on the back of one of the best, most viscerally moving, works of electronic music ever released. But Gerald Simpson has done so much more than Voodoo Ray. He was in 808 State, early on, and wrote / helped to write classics like Pacific State; but most importantly he was one of the first jungle producers, helping to develop the fledgling genre as it emerged out of hardcore.
As Gerald explains it, in this interview with Test Pressing (and also when I interviewed him for Line Noise), he had dabbled with a breakbeat before, notably on 1989 track Specific Hate (which, yes, is a Pacific State reference); but the main impetus to switch up his sound came before a gig in Coventry.
“I remember the DJ before me was playing fast and normally I played at 125bpm,” he explained. “The tempo was fast though so I had to speed up what I was doing so I sped it up and I had some breaks on a floppy disc and I dropped the break under a 4/4… I tried to mix into what he was doing and then I kept all that afterwards. When I got back into the studio I started playing with that sound. It was about 1990 and I was using the MPC60 and I got more and more into it. I got more enjoyment from playing with the breaks.”
His 1991 track, 28 Gun Bad Boy, was a classic with Fabio and Grooverider at their Rage night, which did so much to pioneer jungle, and he followed this in 1993 with an album of the same name, which may well be the first full-length jungle album. 28 Gun Bad Boy, the album, is a fabulous work, brimming with invention and energy - Gerald himself said it was intended “for fellows in Manchester driving around in their rides to listen to” in a 2010 interview with the Red Bull Music Academy.
But Black Secret Technology, which followed in 1995, went several steps deeper. It is an album of psychedelic depths and liquidity, of blurred shapes and uncertain borders, which had an unusually soft touch to it. “Basically a lot of the sounds at the time were getting a bit harder on the jungle scene,” Gerald explained in a 1996 interview with Metropolis magazine. “I wanted to sound like, how I can say? More liquid. I came from the more acid house kind of vibe. It was more experimental I suppose.”
“Liquid” is very much the word for it. Later that would become the name of an entire subgenre of drum & bass. But compared to the sheer fluidity of Black Secret Technology, the work of Calibre, Logistics et al sounds like the harsh, unbending logic of a concrete bunker. Black Secret Technology is music at its most giving, its most tenderly pliant. This is a very busy album, full of eerie synth chords, pillowy sub bass, breaks, vocals and strings, which pulls from hardcore, jazz, reggae, Detroit techno, hip hop, dub, soul and more. But it is also notable for its absences. Several songs are almost entirely without a bass drum, while traditional song structure, loops and any kind of repetition are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, the various elements swirl and eddy around each other like sticks hurled into a fast-flowing river.
The 14 songs here (including hidden CD track, a bizarre new jack swing / dub hybrid that reminds me of the Pet Shop Boys) blend into each other, with the occasional false ending thrown in, while particular sonic elements repeat, like the sirens on So Many Dreams, which turn up again one track later on Alita's Dream. Voodoo Ray even makes a re-appearance, in the form of Voodoo Rage, the new track’s rhythm folding in on itself like a crumpled crisp package. (It’s worth mentioning here that I do have the old, murkily mastered album. But, frankly, the new remaster doesn’t add a great deal more clarity.)
Gerald proves an absolute master of drum programming on Black Secret Technology. The occasional lack of bass drum, which gives songs like Finley’s Rainbow and So Many Dreams an almost ambient flavour is a clever move. In other places - notably Dreaming of You and Cyberjazz - the drums feel almost perilous in their unhinged, unrooted clatter, the sound of a rhythm falling down a hill, desperately grabbing for strands of long grass to hold on to. The cut up drums and effects on Survival, meanwhile, sound a lot like Aphex Twin’s work on Richard D. James, one year before the release of that seminal album.
But Gerald also has a very sharp ear for a melodies, which emerge from the psychedelic dusk like spluttering spotlights. Gerald considered the album an attempt to “push something forward that was melodic and rhythmic, and deeply embedded in the technology of the period”, as he explained in a 2020 interview with 909 Originals. The Nile, for example, has a gorgeous, wordless vocal loop à la Voodoo Ray, catchy almost despite itself, while Cybergen has a descending techno-ish chord sequence that reminds me of Orbital at their most epic - were Orbital to embrace rhythms that seem to deliberately upend the promising dancer.
For the album as a whole, 4Hero and Goldie - who collaborates with Gerald on Energy - are more obvious touch points, as Gerald acknowledged in his RBMA interview. “The earlier stuff was… it wasn’t just jump up, but that was the stuff that was really pushing forward because it was mass out there. There was a lot of people, there was a lot of DJs spinning, a lot of pirate radio stations were pushing that level of it, which was really cool. But also, at the same time there was artists like 4Hero on the Reinforced label. Even some of the early stuff that Goldie was doing. He was working with them at the time. There was a lot of – as with the earlier Detroit stuff – a lot of string-led, emotional type of stuff. But there was no album. I thought, ‘Wow, for people who actually hear this music seriously, there needs to be some kind of album.’”
The idea that there was “no album” out there for deep jungle fans to listen to is rather harsh on 4Hero, whose brilliant Parallel Universe LP had been released in 1994. But you can see what Gerald means. Black Secret Technology has a serious depth and variety - of tone, flavour and influences - which makes it a satisfying listen from start to finish and there is more than enough going on to keep the armchair listener tuned in for its 78-minute run time. At the same time, the album features several examples of what come close to actual songs, notably on the vocal cuts So Many Dreams and Finley’s Rainbow.
The latter track is particularly unhinged, combining a vocal from reggae singer Finley Quaye, the Bug in The Bass Bin drums, nebulous sub bass line and plucked strings. It feels like reggae, viewed under water and utterly devoid of joy, a psychedelic masterpiece of electronic music. (For an interesting contrast, you can hear Quaye’s own version of the song, Sunday Shining, which was released in 1997. It is recognisably the same melody but Sunday Shining - a big, lilting pop reggae number that was a massive hit in the UK - could not be farther from Finley’s Rainbow in its emotional pitch.)
Like many great psychedelic albums - Pink Floyd’s The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, Love’s Forever Changes, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld - Black Secret Technology is both surprisingly light in sound and ultra-dense in ideas. That makes it a lot to take in. But Black Secret Technology is also an album that rewards intense listening, one that feels brilliantly unknowable, like a garden well that plummets to unseen depths or a hedge maze never conquered. And the name fits like a glove: A Guy Called Gerald’s fourth album is secretive, technologically complex and definitely black as hell.
Some listening
There’s probably no right answer as to who invented techno. But Cybotron - aka Juan Atkins (and once Richard “3070” Davis) - would definitely not be the wrong one, with the duo’s 1981 single Alleys Of Your Mind a clear genre frontrunner. (If you want to read more about Cybotron, may I direct you to a piece I wrote for DJ Magazine about their classic debut album Enter.) Maintain is taken from Cybotron’s first new EP in 28 years, after some dazzling live shows in 2019, and bears all of Atkins’ visionary funk and clear melodic lines, together with an elegant electro beat and gruff vocal hook. It’s a futuro-retro treat. And if you want to listen to my Line Noise interview with Juan and his daughter Milan Ariel, come this way.
Lauren Flax - I Don't Want To Hurt You
House music doesn’t have to be specifically about anything to move the soul; at the same time, I do love house songs that explore emotional complexities within their shuffling grooves. I Don’t Want To Hurt You, by US producer Lauren Flax, written in collaboration with Liz Wight of Pale Blue, certainly falls into this category: Flax explains that the song “is about the pain of loving someone without being ‘in love’ with them and the guilt that follows” and manages to convincingly convey this tangled emotional web alongside a gorgeously desolate chord sequence, synth tinkles and a sprinkling of 303. It feels low-key anthemic.
How about some new old music, as summer ends? Frankie B is a little-known London artist, who produced this sublime portion of echoed-out digidub for the Ital Stuff label in early 1986 (it has just been re-released by Death Is Not The End sub-label 333). The production is fabulous, cheeky, restrained and somehow reticent, liked a dubbed-out church mouse, while the melody is classic. You will be singing it for weeks.
… and talking of new old music, we have a freshly reissued gem from the ever-dependable Analog Africa roster. Diarabi Mana is the first single to be taken from a new compilation of music by mysterious Guinean guitarist Leon Keïta, taking what they promise is a deep dive into Mandigue culture (a culture situated in West Africa, based largely around the language, traditions and music of the Malinkés, Bambaras and Dioulas.) Diarabi Mana twins Mandigue music with an Afrobeat swing and a particularly fruity organ line and comes out sounding a little like Steve Miller’s The Joker. Irresistible.
DJ Minx - A Walk In The Park (Moodymann remix)
I wasn’t very keen on Moodymann’s recent remix of Róisín Murphy’s What Not To Do - it felt a little KDJ by numbers, too clean, and the two vocals didn’t really work together. But Moodymann’s remix of DJ Minx’s minimal house anthem A Walk In The Park is fabulous, scuffing up and peeling back the original’s very tidy beats, while keeping the brilliantly dirty bass line.
Things I’ve done
Not much. I’ve been on holiday. But if you want to see me on TikTok asking Bad Religion about never getting bored of playing American Jesus you can do that here. The clips is from Primavera Madrid, where we did a full interview with the band on the Amazon Music Twitch. And I am afraid you can’t see it now. Sorry.
GUARANTEED better than day-time French radio! With 1,559 brilliant songs. Please do listen and like. You can do that here.