Michael Smith, dub poet now ghost

I write this blog for my own pleasure, but I very much welcome comments – even when they’re antagonistic (and probably justified!) My post on Burial’s much-lauded debut just pips to the post – in terms of number of comments – my entry about dub poet Michael Smith who was tragically stoned to death after criticising the speaker at a political rally. In the 14 months since I penned it, it’s slowly but surely attracted people to contribute their memories and enthusiasm for the man and his art. It’s worth reading at least those comments – and you can find the MP3s of his one-and-only-album-never-reissued-on-CD I’ve posted up there as well. (I’ll take them down if anybody ever responds to my occasional emails entreating companies to reissue the album.) In my original post, I referred to my hearing Michael Smith on a John Peel show. Until the other day, I’d never seen the man himself, but the observant reader will have noted an embedded YouTube-hosted video preceding this text. A kind reader posted the link. So I found myself confronting this eery, haunting video, finally seeing the man through blurry analogue artefacts, dancing alone in a darkened television studio, rising up like an apparition, but very much somehow living and breathing just like in those nine tracks and 32 minutes of Mi C-Yaan Believe It. God bless him, mi c-yaan believe he’s not here, madhouse, madhouse…

(WordPress has been a bit temperamental about embedding the YouTube player, so if you can’t see it above, you can find it here.)