The Green Door All Stars – Youth Stand Up!
The Green Door Studio has an impeccable track record when it comes to delivering weird, wonderful and innovative music from the local Glasgow scene. This is due, in no small part, to founders Emily MacLaren, Stuart Evans and Sam Smith, who set up the studio with the admirable aim of broadening access to recording and music production. Put simply, since the studio’s foundation almost a decade ago, they’ve devoted much of their time to running free training courses, workshops and drop-in sessions for teenagers, and young musicians not in full-time employment or training. It’s a policy that has famously paid dividends, with Golden Teacher, Happy Meals, Whilst, Sons&Daughters and Shopping amongst the bands to have come through the Green Door system.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that Green Door should want to extend this air of opportunity to musicians based elsewhere in the world. It was early 2014 when MacLaren approached Optimo’s JD Twitch with the idea of a cross-cultural collaboration between Green Door regulars and young musicians based at similarly forward-thinking musical outposts in Ghana and Belize. The project would be funded by the Big Lottery Fund’s Celebrate strand, with all proceeds being returned to the two overseas institutions involved, the Tafi Cultural Institute in Ghana and the Lebeha Drumming Centre in Hopkins, Belize, home to the Tutme Band.
Eighteen months on, the results are finally available in the form of Youth Stand Up!, a predictably vibrant and musically mixed-up album appearing on Twitch, Midland and Auntie Flo’s Autonomous Africa label. The musical cast-list is unsurprisingly epic, with 11 Glasgow-based musicians (including one still at school, plus members of Psychic Soviets and Froth) being joined by seven Ghanaians and five Belizians. From the start, this guaranteed an impressively diverse list of influences and inspirations; not just Ghanaian Highlife and Borborbor, and Belizian Garifunian music (a blend of West African influences and Latin American rhythms), but also post-punk, free jazz, dub, dancehall and contemporary electronic dance styles.
With such disparate threads to connect, Youth Stand Up! could have resulted in a self-righteous musical mess. That it doesn’t is a tribute to the skills of all involved, but particularly the influence of Golden Teacher members Cassie Oji, and Ollie and Laurie Pitt. Along with Stuart Evans, it was these three who travelled to Ghana and Belize. Their influence, though, seems more profound, though, as much of Youth Stand Up! sounds like a Golden Teacher record, right down to the use of analogue drum machines (invariably paired with humid live drumming from Belizian and Ghanaian musicians), dub delays, and fuzzy analogue electronics.
The Pitt brothers’ swinging, disco-punk percussion can be heard throughout (see “Come With Me”, which sounds like a deeper take on the band’s “Party” single), while Oji’s distinctive voice is a recurrent feature. The chiming, sticky future voodoo of “Beat The Drum”, and organic dancehall workouts “Tuteme vs Tafi Atome At The Green Door” and “Set Upon The River” – both including some trademark patois riffing from Oji – wouldn’t feel out of place on Golden Teacher releases.
This is not meant as a criticism, but rather an indication of the trio’s obvious role in making the project work. There are, of course, plenty of other highlights where other musicians come to the fore, and these are amongst the album’s most enthralling moments. You’ll struggle to find anything quite as dizzyingly positive as the title track – all punchy highlife horns, triumphant Garifunian rhythms and cheery vocals – while the woozy “Lagueda” is a poignant, melancholic delight.
Matt Anniss
Tracklisting:
1. Youth Stand Up
2. Ava Wo Nane
3. Come With Me
4. Crawling By Me
5. Beat The Drum
6. Set Upon The River
7. Lagueda
8. Tsorna
9. Tuteme vs Tafi Atome at the Green Door
10. Digital bonus – ‘Akpe Lo’