The Comedy of Errors: Slowjam - Freefall (16 May 1992)

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If I offend anyone’s musical sensibilities with the terms I’m about to use, I apologise, but when I listen to the infectiously danceable grooves and driving riffs on Freefall, I find myself thinking that with a bit more love and care, Baggy music could have stretched on through the 1990s and beyond to be wildly acclaimed as irresistible British funk.  Club nights dedicated to it wouldn’t be retro affairs, but instead cutting edge affairs with expectant clubbers waiting to see what new tune was going to
carry the assembled throng into dancing ecstasy.  Gigs would be a nirvana of groove dancing, for this was a form of music that understood that if you can engage the feet first, you don’t necessarily need to worry about engaging the head or the heart.
There’s an ocean of possibilities suggested by Slowjam in the opening movements of this track. If the Baggy movement needed a Santana act, then the role was surely theirs. And then in one endearingly, awful moment all such grandiose ideas fall away as the music drops out to assail the audience with a Casio keyboard demonstration setting with added police siren and instead of music for the ages, Freefall is destined to remain stuck as a product of its time in the early 1990s when British guitar bands were resolutely determined not to sound like guitar bands, but lacked the wit and subtlety of the post-punks from 10-15 years earlier to use their toys in genuinely surprising/groundbreaking ways.
For all that I can sit here and bleat about missed opportunities, Slowjam don’t miss by much.  Freefall still rocks like a bastard though the heavily echo-laden vocal suggests that while the Brits could play funk, they needed tricks to help them sing it.  When Peel played this on 16/5/92, it almost qualified for “oldie” status.  The track on the video is taken from a John Peel show originally broadcast on 21 September 1991.  Peel was due to take his Roadshow out to Leicester later in that week, so may well have brought the record out as a potential floor filler for that gig.

Here’s what you do with a guitar and a recently found synthesiser (from 1978)
*No Brexit related sub-texts intended with this, just a bloody good record.


Videos courtesy of John Peel (Slowjam) and Junk Gunk ‘n’ Punk (Europeans)