Despite forgetting I even had this LP, its rediscovery triggers a memory of a review I read of it, concerning the difficulty of encompassing so many cultures in twelve tracks. Of course everyone thinks their content has a particularly rich and diverse culture, and while the other ones can be captured in a a few quick brushstrokes. At school, our Sixth Form English teacher came across the word "ethnocentric" once, and confessed he'd never heard of it before — which summed up his embrace of diversity very concisely. But in the eighties, a highlife track, some afrobeat, something by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Yousso N'Dour, maybe Johnny Clegg and Cheb Khaled. If we knew all of them, we thought we knew African music — well, I did, if I thought about it at all. But then, apart from this one, I only had Talking Book Volume 1, and never heard Volume 2 (Introduction to Africa), which has an altogether more interesting tracklist.
The review I read questioned whether the Cocteau Twins could be said to be in any way representative of Scottish music, and you can see the point. Four of the twelve tracks have a connection to the Celtic fringe: the Cocteaus, The Pogues, Dick Gaughan and Ti Jazz (from Brittany — I'm using the Van Morrison definition of Celtic), which seems quite a lot.
The book part of this Talking Book has interviews with all sorts, from John Peel and Simon Raymonde to the Mad Professor, and features on Breton and Portuguese traditions, jazz in Europe, and Mari folksongs from the Volga-Ural region, among others. There's a great essay about the voice in European singing by John Hardy, which actually does rather a neat job of linking Liz Frazer's Cocteau vocals with the tradition of Scottish Psalm singing in the Isle of Lewis and the style of of singing in the Balkans (there were some of those Scottish Psalms on Radio 3 last week, and they sound extraordinary; quite 'un-British'). In many ways, the Talking Books were trying to do something similar for 'world music' to what the Unknown Public series has since tried to do for contemporary classical, electroacoustic and chamber music. And I guess that, similarly, they struggled. The grand mission of educating and informing your audience at the same time as entertaining them is very… grand. The only organisation that manages to embody these Reithian principles sustainably is the the one that Reith helped create: the BBC.
Meanwhile the web seems to have forgotten this album almost as thoroughly as I had. The only substantial evidence of it that I've been able to find is on this online shop. In case that disappears, here is the tracklisting.
Side 1
- Nadka Karadjova - Ivan And Donka Are In Love
- A. Sidouchkina - Song Of The Homeland
- The Pogues - The Body Of An American
- Dick Gaughan - Song Of Choice
- Selda - Türk Köylüsü
- Pedro Caldeira Cabral - Entrada
- El Nino De Almaden - Farucca
Side 2:
- Stockhausen, Brüninghaus And Studer - Strahlenspur
- Ti Jazz - Suite Plinn, Ton Simple
- Muszikás - Elment A Madárka (To The Memory Of György Martin)
- Mad Professor - Fast Forward Into Dub
- Cocteau Twins - Pink, Orange, Red
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