M: Famous Last Words (67:28)/ Robin Scott + Shikisha- Jive Shikisha! (65:13)
Review by Peter Doggett.
"Pop Muzik" made M a household name, and garnered a stack of royalties for M-man Robin Scott.
But its novalty value and modernist decoration condemned band and man to the pigeon-hole marked "one
hit wonder". After three decreasingly successful follow ups, Scott reached 1982 in desperate need of
a new sensation. The chief contender on that year's "Famous Last Words" was "Double talk", which revamped the "Pop Muzik"
riff with enough invention to warrant another top 10 hit. Scott also deserves some kind of award for his uncanny impression
of "scarry monsters"- era Bowie on "The Bridge". Not everything on "Famous Last Words" was that clever, but it never
dips beneath a certain level of interest- which is more than it managed from press or public at the time.
"Famous Last Words" is packaged with seven bonus tracks, three of them unissued, but its companion piece is an entirely unissued album.
Predating Paul Simon by a year, Scott travelled to Nairobi in 1984 to craft a creative merger between his tricky pop and the Kenyan equivalent
of township jive. New York, London, Paris, Munich....Nairobi? Not Quite, as Scott let the African vocal group Shikisha take the lead,
injecting his sly comments between their heady burst of harmony. No record company would take the risk of more than a single ("Crazy Zulu"/"Africa") from
this project at the time, but 14 years on it sounds a remarkably vibrant piece of work- not ethnically pure of course, but all the more post- modern for it.
