Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires , I was just blown away,” says Evelyn. To match the sci-fi dub in the grooves of these albums, Greensleeves cover designerTony McDermott created playful cartoon illustrations that Evelyn and his friends pored over for cultural clues. “Those cartoons would also have all the sound system imagery, and that’s how I learned the importance of bass to dub,” says Evelyn.“So the attraction was there with the music, but you can also see the [appeal] of those cartoons from a child’s point of view.” Decades later, he would return to these sleeves for inspiration in conceptualizing the cover art for Echo45 Sound System . - ’ROUND THE OUTSIDE -
across the U.K. in early 1983. Four years earlier, the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” had reached #3 on the U.K. singles chart, the first time most people in the country had heard rap. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock” followed in 1982, but it would take the prophetic McLaren to expose young U.K. ears and eyes to the four elements of hip-hop: MCing, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti. “The [“Buffalo Gals”] video opened up the Pandora’s box of Bronx street science; it was a full-frontal introduction to what we would later learn was hip-hop,” DJ and Wax Poetics contributor Greg Wilson wrote of the moment on his blog, Electrofunkroots.“It would be no exaggeration to say that, from this moment onwards, British youth culture was never the same. The contents of this video quite literally changed people’s lives.” One of those people was the young George Evelyn. “We had experienced the disco side of hip-hop through Kurtis Blow, then ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ followed by the Street Sounds Electro 1 album that Morgan Khan brought out,” Evelyn says. “It was like every week I was getting something from another planet. But seeing the video of ‘Buffalo Gals’ was the real epiphany because of how it connected the four elements.” Looking back, he notes the strong parallels between his two early cultural influences.“I find [there is] the perfect lineage between
A teenage Evelyn was soon to experience another life-changing culture shock where sound and imagery collided when the video for Malcolm McLaren’s “Buffalo Gals” was beamed into living rooms
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( top ) George Evelyn (at left) performing a routine with Solar City Rockers crewmates Jonny Bell, Steve Watty, and Patrick Cargill at Bradford’s Mayflower club in 1984.
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