Tackhead & Mark Stewart

Tackhead were one of the most influential musical collectives of the 1980s in the field of dance music. Starting from rap, funk, dub, and soul, they revolutionized the concept of the musical track and the process by which it is created. They, above all, invented a highly personal and extremely powerful style. Vehemence itself is perhaps the most distinctive trait of their productions. But it will instead be the fusion of those "black" styles that remains the most important legacy left by the group, because trip-hop and many other musics of the 90s would be born precisely from mixtures of that kind. Only, few would have the breakthrough power of Tackhead.

Their discography is varied and confusing because it includes records credited to different musicians.

Keith Leblanc (percussion and keyboards), who became famous for some agit-prop raps (such as his sampling of Malcolm X's speeches in No Sell Out from 1983, the first track in which the drum machine was tuned to the music), Doug Wimbish (bass, later in Living Colour), and Skip McDonald (guitar) were New Jersey kids who, like many of their peers, experimented with new recording techniques that surfaced after the boom of Jamaican disc jockeys.

Their experiments helped build The Message, Grandmaster Flash's masterpiece. This trio was later hired by producer Adrian Sherwood and, under the pseudonym Maffia, was paired with the great Mark Stewart (former singer of the Pop Group).

The first EP of this ensemble, Jerusalem (On-U Sound, 1983), contains the elements of their career in embryonic form: first of all, a floor of very heavy dub, then an elegance in the arrangements worthy of chamber music, and finally an awareness of the electronic studio that would suffice for an avant-garde composer. Stewart, for his part, continues the program launched with the Pop Group, reshuffling the visionary declamation of William Blake's eponymous poem, excerpts from a national anthem, crowd ovations, and a church choir. High Ideals And Crazy Dreams did the same thing with a random succession of jazz trumpet phrases and electronic sirens. In the simpler Liberty City, Stewart crooned a languid soul melody, counterpointed by a jazz trumpet and a gospel choir.

The album Learning To Cope With Cowardice (Rough Trade, 1983), released a few months later, accentuated the experimentation, submerging the vocals under layers and layers of electronic (often dissonant) sounds. Stewart, indifferent to the chaos, shouts his agit-prop proclamations. Brecht's technique of "alienation" is brought to levels of barbaric exasperation. Heaps of dissonance explode the most ferocious funk, such as Blessed Are Those Who Struggle, shattered into telluric beat-box shocks, alien hisses, and ultra-syncopated dub. Stewart's voice fades into a labyrinth of electronic interference. It's as if Edgard Varèse had taken up hip hop. The title track is a funeral sermon, intoned by Stewart in a colloquial and dramatic register over the martial cadences of an "acidic" sounding organ, teeming with disordered polyrhythms.
The refrain of None Dare Call It A Conspiracy is smothered in a dense undergrowth of samples and aborted dub rhythms. Stewart aims for a revolutionary folk in Don't You Ever Lay Down Arms, with the trumpet's call-and-toll repeating slower and slower, blurred, already epic, and in the reggae fanfare of Paranoia Of Power. But everything is wrapped in a gravitational cloud that deforms and slows down.

The same ensemble (Sherwood, LeBlanc, Wimbish, and McDonald) also accompanies Stewart on As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade (Mute, 1985). The sound is even more chaotic, dissonant, and rugged. Atonality and "scratching" at times give the impression of an indiscriminate bombardment, along with the abandonment of dub rhythms. The vocals are more than ever a "spoken word" modulated in a theatrical manner and filtered/sampled until rendered unrecognizable in the general chaos. It is not the lyrics that tell the story, but the music as a whole. Especially since Stewart often replaces his own voice (particularly in the title track) with "found" voices, samples, and collages, which are better suited to his didactic program. Moreover, the development of these tracks is always obstructed by infinite fractures, always aborted even before starting, hidden like an allegory within their arduous language of metamorphosis.
The move toward the industrial music of Cabaret Voltaire is evident in the "metallurgical" shocks of Slave Of Love and in the electronic "flour" ground by Hypnotized, one of the tracks richest in turbulence. The pounding polyrhythms of Passcivecation Program and the gusts of distortion in Bastards are among the most hostile sounds ever documented on album.
From the record's harmonic massacre, the relatively simple synthpop of Resistance Cell manages to emerge, and above all Pay It All Back, an electro-shock hip-hop of high seismic intensity that Stewart bends to his personality as an impassioned political "shouter." In Slave Of Love it feels like hearing Black Sabbath, and Waiting Room utilizes a religious hymn sung by a church choir to close the work in style.
Rather than musical compositions, they are tours de force of revolutionary instincts, storms of deafening electronic polyrhythms. The guerrilla reportage degenerates toward a Freudian nightmare. The primitive ritualism of the Pop Group is reincarnated in more technological forms, but with unchanged ferocity and tribalism.

The "shrapnel-hiphop" coined by the quintet (Stewart plus Maffia) on these records is an intricate amalgam of electronic avant-garde, free jazz, and rap. The desolate metropolitan landscapes staged by this music are worth more than its political pretexts.

Under LeBlanc's name, and still with Sherwood's help, Major Malfunction (World, 1986) was published shortly after; it is practically an uninterrupted suite of house rhythms, vocal samples, tapes of found noises, and assorted electronic effects.
LeBlanc and his companions try to put into play the most bizarre rhythmic irregularities (Get This), to coin a psychotic and exotic techno (Move), to compose concerts of ambient and musique concrète (Object-Subject), to conceive android mutations of the most epidermal funk (You Drummers Listen Good), shifting with ease across the expressive spectrum from the abstract extreme to the hedonistic one. The track in which all these following ideas coagulate is probably Heaven On Earth, which pairs the martial tempo of a mechanical ballet with the grotesquely "Brechtian" register of a reciting voice. Not everything is perfectly realized, but the attempt to refound dance music on intellectual foundations has only one equally valid precedent (Mark Stewart, precisely).

Another Briton, Gary Clail (DJ and singer from Sherwood’s stable), formerly a sound engineer for the group's live shows, joining the ensemble full-time, specializing in vocal manipulation. The album Tape Time (Nettwerk, 1987) is credited to "Gary Clail's Tackhead Sound System," which in fact contains the three 12" singles released by Clail (Half Cut For Confidence, Hard Left, and Reality), albeit in remixed versions. The group has matured in the art of collage and "cut-up"; the rhythms have become more robust and even vaguely African (traces of Talking Heads in Mind At The End Of The Tether). However, Clail's presence focuses all the tracks around his political proclamations and effectively prevents the music from playing out (though the sonic "choreography" of What's My Mission Now is nonetheless splendid).

Power Inc Volume 1 & 2 (Blanc) are anthologies of Tackhead's singles from this prolific period.

This maturity is also put to use on Mark Stewart's third album, which, titled simply Mark Stewart (Mute, 1987), is instead the first to explicitly acknowledge Maffia's contribution to the composition process.
Perhaps also as a result of their increased presence, the hysterical detonation of the first records subsides and gives way to a more reasoned harmonic disorder, to a psychodramatic continuum, pulsating and constantly evolving. If Survival is the anthem (greatly expanded, with funky/dub polyrhythms that almost come to a standstill) of this new season, Survivalist is its war cry: the violent and disjointed gait is disemboweled by bursts of heavy metal, ultrasonic sound bands, wild African percussion, and dizzying collages.
Martial and anguished, Anger Is Holy (the only track for which Stewart wrote the music) pushes the harmonic massacre of tribalisms, distortions, and heavy metal riffs to gargantuan proportions. And the jarring dissonance of Hell Is Empty gives it meaning. Paradoxically, this is also the record where the group scores its first club hit, Stranger, a dainty soul theme, completely inconsistent with Stewart's previous records and the other tracks on this album. Fatal Attraction, with its load of sequencers, even shows a move toward the fashionable techno/ethno/funk.

With Stranger Than Fiction (Nettwerk, 1989), credited to LeBlanc alone, the group delivers another strongly experimental and even more strongly political work, and perhaps the best of the bunch. Not only does LeBlanc demonstrate his mastery in the fields of industrial music (Taxcider and Mechanical Movements) and psycho-ambient music (Here's Looking At You and Men In Capsules), which would already be more "earthy" than the high-brow abstractions of before, but he also tackles jazz-rock (Steps) and free jazz (Count This) scores of great suggestiveness. Predominantly instrumental, the album abandons the pseudo-Brechtian program of coining didactic dance music in favor of atmospheric dance music.

The name Tackhead is officially born with Friendly As A Hand Grenade (TVT, 1989), featuring Bernard Fowler on vocals and a sound that often mimics the refined and explosive funky-soul of Was (Not Was). If the average tone is that of a hybrid between rap and soul (highlighted by Tell Me The Hurt and Stealing, a reworking of Paul Kelly's hit and very similar to Reality), the most significant innovations are represented by the pressing and demented Demolition House and the brutalities of Airborn Ranger, achieved by layering electronics to reach a symphonic effect and grafting heavy metal guitar work on top.

The dissident "toaster" Clail pursued his hyper-politicized "rap & reggae" with increasingly commercial works: End Of The Century Party (On-U Sound, 1989), containing the hit Beef, The Emotional Hooligan (Perfecto, 1991), a million-selling album, and Dreamstealers (Perfecto, 1993), on which Who Pays The Piper appears, still under the protective wing of Sherwood, who inspires many of the danceable banalities of these mediocre works. In the early '90s, both Beef and Human Nature would be major club hits.

The capitulation also involves the second album under the Tackhead name, Strange Things (SBK, 1990), a work that is still formally pleasant, drawing inspiration from rock (Super Stupid, Dangerous Sex), funk (Class Rock), and ambient music (Strange Things, Positive Suggestion), but which fails to be particularly engaging.

LeBlanc, for his part, recorded first Raw (Blanc, 1990) and then Time Traveller (Blanc, 1992), in which he rethinks some of Tackhead's themes under the banner of his beastly hip-hop and the jazz-funk that must run through his veins, but which has never quite managed to fully surface. LeBlanc would later record the single Stop The Confusion (4th & Broadway, 1993), the mini-album What Order (Blanc, 1996), etc.

In the meantime, Mark Stewart, who by now can be considered one of the primary innovators of funk and dub music, definitively abandoned militant poses with Metatron (Mute, 1990). The album, his fourth solo effort, continues his experience as an affiliate of Tackhead (or rather, Maffia). Having lost the singer's roar, however, the music settles into a dance "groove" that is as futile as it is pretentious (Hysteria). Only in Collision does the production (which eviscerates the sonic flow and leaves unnatural pauses between guitar riffs, beat-box hits, vocal phrases, and so on) find an original format.
It is no coincidence that Doug Wimbish would later join Living Colour, who would simply be the commercial version of that idea.

Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald, and Doug Wimbish formed Strange Parcels in the 1990s, whose Disconnection (Restless, 1994) represents another milestone of technological funk.

McDonald and Adrian Sherwood themselves, still supported by the rhythm section of LeBlanc and Wimbish, launched instead the project Little Axe, which debuted with Never Turn Back (On-U Sound, 1993). The Wolf That House Built (Okeh, 1994) blends ambient music, dub, and blues (sampling Howlin' Wolf, Son House, and Lead Belly, among others) and effectively coins a new musical genre. Tracks like Ride On are brilliant transpositions of spirit and style from one world to another, and back again. The experiment seems to fizzle out, however, after Slow Fuse (Wired, 1996) and its remix alter-ego Fusion. McDonald, Sherwood, LeBlanc, and Wimbish instead recorded again as Little Axe the album Hard Grind (Fat Possum, 2002), their "blues" album.

Mark Stewart's sound has become increasingly subdued over the years. The spasmodic storms of the past give way on Control Data (Mute, 1996) to graceful soul symphonies (Dream Kitchen), sensual disco-music suites (Forbidden Love), grotesque techno torpedoes (Digital Justice), and surreal medleys of dub and rap (Scorpio). In the danceable field, the most infectious track is perhaps The Half. The record is credited to Stewart, but his voice contributes very little; in fact, for the most part, it seems out of place (as a conventional singer, Stewart is not at his best). Keith LeBlanc is missing, and in his place is Simon Mundey, who floods the arrangements with electronic waves. More synthetic and more melodic than its predecessors—and above all flatter, smoother, and more elegant—this record decrees Stewart's definitive retirement from the revolution.

After a hiatus that lasted an eternity, the new album by Keith LeBlanc, Freakatorium (On-U-Sound, 1999), is released—as always assisted by Skip McDonald and Doug Wimbish, and as always produced by Adrian Sherwood.

Jungle Funk consists of Vinx on vocals, Doug Wimbish on bass, and Will Calhoun on drums (the rhythm section therefore repeats that of Living Colour). Jungle Funk (EFA, 1998) contains cyber-jams based on instrumental loops and influenced by jazz, funk, and drum'n'bass. Doug Wimbish's album, Trippy Notes For Bass (On-U-Sound, 1999), features LeBlanc, McDonald, Will Calhoun, Talvin Singh, and Bernie Worrell, and offers a somewhat confused and sometimes atmospheric mixture of drum & bass and jazz-funk.

All in all, Tackhead remained an unresolved phenomenon, which only in Stewart's early records managed to fully express its potential. Increasingly more listenable in the instrumental parts than in the vocal ones, they nonetheless squandered their talent on a program too demagogic to also be musical. In this, the hand of Sherwood was probably felt—scantily gifted even in his other operations, however enormously influential.

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Keith LeBlanc's Stop the Confusion (Global Interference, 2005) sounds (excuse the pun) confused and also outdated.

Mark Stewart's Kiss the Future (Soul Jazz, 2005) is a career retrospective

Edit (Crippled Dick, 2008), Mark Stewart's first album of new material in 12 years, marked his conversion to the fad of the new decade, electroclash. He and his usual pack of cohorts unleash the anthemic funk of Rise Again, the turntables and tablas pastiche Puppet Master, the Afro-reggae fusion of Strange Cargo, and the distorted funk of Secret Suburbia (with Denise Sherwood and Samia Farah). A sense of dejavu permeates Almost Human and Radio Freedom, that could have been on any of his previous albums (but would have been ignored by most reviewers). That he finds the room to squeeze in a Yardbirds cover shows that he didn't have enough good material of his own for an album.

Doug Wimbish released a second solo album, CinemaSonics (Yellow Dog, 2008).

Sherwood began releasing music under his own name: Never Trust a Hippy? (2003), Becoming a Cliche' (2006), Survival & Resistance (2012). Sherwood also curated several volumes of Sherwood at the Controls, containing previously unreleased Tackhead and Maffia-era recordings from the 1980s.

Mark Stewart's The Politics Of Envy (Future Noise, 2012) wasted an impressive cast (Public Image Ltd's guitarist Keith Levene, Richard Hell, Lee Scratch Perry, the Raincoats' Gina Birch, the Slits' Tessa Pollitt, Jesus And Mary Chain's Douglas Hart, Massive Attack's Daddy G, Primal Scream and even octogenarian filmmaker Kenneth Anger on theremin) for a set of timid and predictable song.

Skip "Little Axe" McDonald released the albums Champagne & Grits (2004), Stone Cold Ohio (2006), Bought for a Dollar, Sold for a Dime (2010), If You Want Loyalty Buy A Dog (2011), One Man - One Night (2016), and London Blues (2017), plus two collaborations with Matthew "Mad 45" Donahue: Tree Of Life (2018) and Under The Sun (2024).

The original Tackhead quartet (LeBlanc, Wimbish, McDonald, Sherwood) reunited and recorded For the Love of Money (2014).

Mark Stewart collaborated with artists like Lee "Scratch" Perry, Front 242, and KK Null on VS (2022).

Mark Stewart died in 2023 at the age of 62. Keith LeBlanc passed away in April 2024 at the age of 69.