Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I will turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's card read 'Allow An Easement (An easement is the abandonment of a stricture)' and I posted Strict Machine by Goldfrapp and Birge- Risser- Mienniel's improvisational track inspired by that Oblique Strategy card and named after it.  Further responses via the comments took in Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out) by The Hombres from Ernie. Khayem suggested Take It Easy On Yourself by Jerry Butler. Spinoutz dropped in Billy Woods and Yolanda Watson's A Doll Fulla Pins and Jesse suggested Neighbours by Shack. 

Today's Oblique Strategy card suggestion is this...

Go slowly all the way round the outside

I did wonder briefly if I should go slowly with this one, sit on it and wait, see what happened, but this song had already jumped to the front of my mind. 'Two buffalo girls go round the outside/ Round the outside/ Round the outside' had already started circling in my head...

Buffalo Gals

Malcolm McLaren, Trevor Horn, the World's Famous Supreme Team, scratching (making me itch), square dancing, Rock Steady Crew, New York in 1982... what's not to like? Malcolm definitely had talent and on this record he showed it wasn't just as the owner of a clothes shop and as the manager of Sex Pistols. 

I've been listening to My Bloody Valentine recently too- more to come next week- and the go slowly part of the Oblique Strategy took me to this from the You Made Me Realise EP,  a 1988 game changer of a 12" single if ever there was one...

Slow

Slow is a grinding, disorientating stew, led by filthy, grinding bass with head spinning tremelo guitar noise on top and lyrics about licking and sucking and wanting it slow, placing 'my head on your hips' and how 'I'll make you smile'. I think it might be about sex. Which, I've just realised, links it to Malcolm's shop and to his band. 

Feel free to pop your Oblique Saturday suggestions in the comments box. 

V.A. Saturday

In 2004 Don Letts compiled a various artists compilation for Heavenly, Social Classics 3 Dread Meets B- Boys Downtown. It was a hugely listenable sixteen track compilation recreating the summer of 1981 when Don accompanied The Clash and they took over New York with a residency at Bond's Casino in Times Square. The stories are legendary- the promoters oversold the shows, the fire department shut it down, The Clash promised to  honour all sold tickets and ended up playing seventeen nights, an exhausting experience. While that was going on and Don filmed them, the band immersed themselves into New York's street and club culture, Mick Jones especially, and the nascent hip hop scene. Support acts for the group at Bond's included Grandmaster Flash, The Fall, Dead Kennedys, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, The Slits, ESG and The Treacherous Three. 

Don's has various slices of old school hip hop (Grandmaster Flash, Grand Wizzard Theodore, The Fearless Four, Fab Five Freddy, the Wild Style OST), some classic New York dance tracks (Babe Ruth's The Mexican and Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band's version of Apache), some cutting edge early 80s electro (Al- Naafiysh by Hashim), along with Malcolm McLaren, Kraftwerk and The Clash. It's wall to wall early 80s bangers and cutting edge too. 

Grand Wizzard Theodore is from The Bronx, NYC, and is the DJ who is largely credited with inventing scratching. 

Subway Theme

Babe Ruth were an early 70s funk rock band from Hatfield, Hertfordshire. The Mexican was recorded at Abbey Road in 1972, a hugely influential song later on in the decade when the New York hip hop DJs picked up on it and played it, mixed it and sampled it to pieces. 

The Mexican

The Clash were inspired by New York , it sent them into a spin they never really pulled out of. This Is Radio Clash  was a standalone single and 12", fired up by New York. the city's sounds and radio stations. Outside Broadcast was a remix version of the main track, seven and a half minutes of dub sound effects, samples, traffic sounds, rapping and studio experimentation. 

Outside Broadcast

Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Girls is an essential early 80s record, 1982 hip hop produced by Trevor Horn, after Malcolm saw what was happening in New York. He'd been in the city looking for a support act for Bow Wow Wow and went to a block party where he heard hip hop and scratching for the first time.

Buffalo Gals

Fab Five Freddy is a New York hip hop legend, graffiti artist, film maker and face. In 1983 the film Wild Style was released,a document of New York's nascent hip hop scene in 1981 and the track Down By Law comes from the soundtrack. Chris Stein of Blondie worked on the soundtrack and the score too and Freddy would famously later on turn up in the lyrics to Rapture. 

Down By Law

Tramps Like Us

More mid- 80s Liverpool following yesterday's Pink Industry song- today Frankie Goes To Hollywood's over the top, everything turned up to the max cover of Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run. When Trevor Horn and Frankie recorded 1984's double album Welcome To The Pleasure Dome the massive hit singles Relax and Two Tribes had already dominated the airwaves. The Power Of Love and 1985 title track single were further smashes. This left the rest of the album being a bit of a ragtag bunch of skits and covers with a few originals. 

Springsteen's anthem with its dreams of flight and escape from dull lives and dead end jobs- 'this town's a death trap, a suicide rap'- was possibly felt very keenly in mid- 80s Liverpool, a city abandoned by the government into 'managed decline' with high unemployment, derelict buildings and a falling population. For Springsteen the highway offers freedom, even if it's 'jammed with broken heroes... everybody on the run tonight/ But there's no place left to hide'. Holly Johnson gives it his all vocally, a screaming, high octane performance as the drums, bass and guitars pound and squeal, 'tramps like us/ baby we were born to run'. 

On the album and sadly missing from the mp3 below there's a brief bit of dialogue to plant Frankie's cover firmly in Liverpool rather than New Jersey, a man signing on at the dole office and getting short shrift from a DHSS employee who threatens to put him on daily sign on. The humour of that brief exchange places the song and Springsteen's outsider road anthem in a slightly different light. You can get in the car, hit the M62 but they'll stop your giro and you'll be skint very quickly. 

Born To Run

The population flight from Liverpool was something Pete Wylie noted in Wah!'s epic single, also released in 1984, Come Back, a home made epic on a Springsteen scale and a plea to his fellow scousers not to go elsewhere but to stay, stand your ground and fight. 'Come back/ I'm making my stand/ Come back'.

Come Back (The Return Of The Randy Scouse Git)

Dutch Butterfly

Malcolm McLaren has been painted as the villain in the Sex Pistols story for many years, usually by John Lydon who commands more air time and print inches than the rest of the participants put together. Malcolm was instrumental in that band's story but his wider contribution to popular culture goes way beyond the filth and the fury and subsequent crash and burn. Following the demise of the Pistols he kept running, straight into Bow Wow Wow and then moved on again, faster and faster, intent on mashing together disparate elements to create something new. This led to at least two further moments of inspiration and musical alchemy. 

In 1983 Malcolm put out his debut album, Duck Rock. His debut single Buffalo Girls was a genuine piece of cross cultural game changing with scratching and sampling, the World Famous Supreme Team, Zulu backing singers, Trevor Horn at the production desk, a record that was key in early hip hop culture. He followed it with Double Dutch, equally brilliant and further blurring cultural boundaries- skipping chants, a zippy bassline, hi- life guitars and South African vocals. He was sued by The Boyoyo Boys for that but a Top Three hit in the UK chart must have softened that blow. 

Double Dutch

Two years later he went further and deeper releasing an album called Fans that spliced opera with modern R & B. Madame Butterfly, a version of Puccini's famous work, a genuinely jaw- dropping piece of music- Stephen Hague now at the controls, crunching 80s synth drums, flutes, McLaren's speaking voice and hugely affecting vocals from Debbie Cole and Betty Ann White. 

Madame Butterfly (Un Bel Di Vedremo)

This version, a remix by Morales and Munzibai, stretches it out for ten minutes with a much toughened up rhythm-  industrial/ hip hop drums and foregrounded metallic, slap bass and whooshing noises. 

Madame Butterfly (On The Fly Mix)

Malcolm's death in 2010 brought some correction to his story and his role in punk but there's much more to Malcolm than just the Sex store, bondage trousers and Johnny Rotten, a tale we've all heard a thousand times anyway. Double Dutch and Madame Butterfly are both moments of madcap 80s brilliance made by someone who had a hundred ideas a day and the wherewithal to follow them through. 

The Sound Of The Atom Splitting

The Sound Of The Atom Spitting was the B-side to the 1988 single Left To My Own Devices, a stone cold Pet Shop Boys killer single. For the B-side, a song much loved by both Julian Cope's head Heritage website and Jon Savage to name but two, Neil and Chris plus producer Trevor Horn wanted to take acid house, as inspired by the sounds they were hearing and their own line about 'Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat', and make actually psychedelic acid house. This involved the drum beat from Left To My Own Devices, some 303 bassline madness, Neil playing Debussy inspired chords on the keyboard, stereo panning and the full range of studio tricks. Neil's lyric imagines a conversation between a fascist and a liberal and the end of the world. Just another day in the studio for the Pet Shop Boys.

The Sound Of The Atom Splitting