The Great Full English Breakfast

I’m currently sitting in China being cooked fried eggs and ham by our extremely welcoming housemate Wynand. It reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while. Something that will no doubt make me hanker for that greasy and pleasant land again in a few months’ time. Something that no one else does quite as well as England. Yes, that wonderful symphonic production of morning calorific exuberance, the English breakfast fry up. What follows will be an exposition of my love for the art itself, a quick description of what a good fry up consists of and finally a few reviews of some places I’ve recently tried.

                                 There’s nothing I love more than getting up on a Saturday morning (or any working week equivalent thereof) and not eating breakfast for a long time. This probably sounds a bit odd, especially to those readers who know me. Allow me now to contextualise this a bit. I will patiently wait until my stomach is growling at me a little, lodging a complaint at the lack of sustenance, and at that point start preparations for cooking my own fry up. Either that or I wait until my stomach is behaving more like a pack of angry wolves and then plot a trajectory to my nearest frying emporium. It is then time to set off, minding the vague dizziness arising from the pure desire for pre-noon calories. I often have a partner in this activity and I have to say my personal favourite is my good friend Dan, he simply understands the subtleties and more brazen parts of this wonderful fatty assa(u)lt (sorry-I couldn’t resist). We will walk into the aforementioned purveyor of greasy manna and peruse the plastic menus, on which there’ll be a selection of set breakfasts and single fried items. Dan is a true connoisseur and will therefore inevitably infuriate the short order chef by endlessly customising his order, I will admittedly often accept his wisdom and swiftly copy him.

                                How does the breakfast decision making process proceed? Well, there are the basics. There must be bacon, eggs, beans and a side order of toast as a bare minimum. These are the struts on which this great structure is not so delicately balanced. I then would usually need further pork input in the shape of a sausage. A word about this sausage (me and Dan have held several working committees on the subject, usually over an enormous pile of freshly fried delectation): the sausage should not be of excellent quality. This is not in keeping with the mood of this particular symphony. Neither should it be so bad quality as to taste like offal mixed with shredded wall insulation (you know the ones-the Walls have ears and all that). It should be of medium low quality, so as to provide adequate offal resistance and give your jaw the challenge it needs in the morning, but also not provide too many complex flavours to deal with at this inhuman time of day. The eggs should be fried with a medium amount of yolk-al wobble, so when the toast (or chips) is (or are-I am an English teacher after all) inserted it bursts with a pleasing eruption of golden cholesterol. They should not however risk giving you salmonella, no golden eruption is worth that. The bacon should again not be too fancy and, I believe, should not be crispy but more on the back bacon side of things, arriving with a clear seam of fatty goodness on one side. Ideally the beans should be Heinz, but this is not essential, the main thing is they should be in one self-contained pool, possibly bounded by, to paraphrase Steve Coogan’s Allan Partridge, a breakwater being provided by the sausage. There should on no account be a tomato sauce inundation occurring, we wouldn’t want our wonderful orchestra drowned. The toast again should not be particularly high quality and butter is preferential but alas a rare treat at your average friary. Now the extras, and these are much more up for debate. Dan is not a fan of chips, but I think they have their place from time to time and provide an interesting alternative to soldiers for the eggs-also, a vessel for salt and vinegar is always welcomed by me, a bit of acetic acid could well stop immediate heart failure too at this point. Bubble is another welcome potato based addition, as long as it’s well made with a good golden crust from frying and some shredded cabbage to add some sort of illusion of health to this whole affair. I always like fried mushrooms, but they must be cut up to a good size and fried well (preferably in butter), until the outsides are sealed but the inside still yield a good juicy reaction to one’s ravenous bites. Hash browns are the other alternative and they are of course delicious, though there is not too much to say about them as they are generally from frozen and are thus pretty homogenous in their quality. Essentially the carbohydrate element should provide not just sustenance but also a sponge for all the various liquid like elements of this meal. They should underpin it, they should provide the bass and percussion section to this particular experience. One other thing that is always welcome is a fried tomato-not, I would hasten to add, a gooey pile of tinned plum tomatoes defiling your plate, and this is wholly unacceptable. It should be a half tomato fried so that there is a slight hint of golden crust and a membrane giving way to a delicious vegetable explosion as you bite into it. A word about beverages: I will always get coffee if it looks like it won’t be muddy dishwater (have a quick look at their coffee making devices before ordering), otherwise I will order tea and, because it will probably have all the subtlety of a brick to the face, soften the blow with a sugar or two. Delicate Dragon Well tea this is not.

                                So there we have it, I hope in its entirety, although I may have missed some bits out, I’m sure Dan will comment if so. I couldn’t build up your hunger like this and not give you a few suggestions for where to calm the baying the hounds, so for those of you in London please have a try of the following four places:  The Workers Café (172 Upper Street), Kigi Café (322 Caledonian Road), Nico’s Café (299 Cambridge Heath Road) and Alpino Café (97 Chapel Market). I went to the Workers with a friend I’d lived with in China and essentially did it to reacquaint myself with an old friend called the big breakfast. This breakfast was neat and well-presented and the service was good, but for me it missed the point. I want a wobbling mass delightful fried flavours, what I do not want is lots of white ceramic spaces staring blankly up at me. No, I desire it to be full to the brim and none too neat, although the components should be clearly defined. The quality of the food was reasonable and it was by no means a bad breakfast, just not quite the perfect one for me. The price was pretty reasonable, at about £5.50 for a big breakfast and coffee (and the coffee was pretty good, the real stuff-no unmentionable instant atrocities present), but somehow it lacked the real punch to be a heavyweight breakfast. So, on to Kigi. Kigi has extremely friendly staff and an amazingly effective short order chef who seems to work almost solo in the kitchen. Again, their breakfast was pretty neat, a good size and a good price, this one is a great option by those unfortunate people who are afraid of grease as it was a lot leaner than the usual offerings. Again, it had excellent coffee for a friary and also a wealth of Middle Eastern dishes to choose from-but therein lies the problem for me, they are not devoted to the way of the frying pan and therefore it comes as no surprise that there is something lacking. I feel a little bad if this turns you off eating there, as it is very good value (again, roughly £5.50), the staff were lovely and the beverages hot and strong, so do give it a go if your tastes are on the less greasy side. Alpino is another one of the above types of cafes; good food, nice staff, good coffee, a reasonable price and a big breakfast. Again great, but something lacking. It will always hold a special place in my heart, though, for it was my last fry up before moving to China with my girlfriend Celia, a final punctuation to power me through the challenge of moving eastwards once again.

                                For the real heavyweight you need to go to east London. There, nestling next to Bethnal Green station, hidden on a noisy junction is an unassuming eatery named Nico’s. I’d heard tell of this place through legend as professed by Dan, but I just couldn’t believe such a breakfast could exist. A breakfast that Dan claimed even seasoned eaters such as us would struggle with. It was therefore with some excitement and trepidation that I awaited my friend’s arrival on a drizzly day in this multicultural hub of east London. I’d built myself up for this one-the hounds were no less than howling for blood in my stomach, and anyone who knows me knows this is in no way a hyperbolic description. Dan arrived and we proceeded into the steamy depths of Nico’s. I perused the plastic menu and was initially slightly concerned as the amount of items didn’t look like anything special (apart from the two eggs) and at £6.00 was at the more expensive end of the scale, but if there’s one thing I have faith in it’s Dan’s ability to display well informed gluttony, treating it as a sort of art form. So I ordered the desired breakfast, if my memory serves me correctly it was something like: bacon, eggs, sausage, beans, chips, toast and coffee. I sat down and waited. A tower of steaming buttered toast arrived. This was promising. I waited a bit longer, nibbling on a bit of toast by way of a starter. And there it was. If a plate could groan under the weight of food this one would be. The first thing that pleased me was that, as if having understood my psyche, they had chosen a plate which was a little too small, making sure that this magnum opus was filled to its brim. The sheer quantity was simply amazing, two eggs, a sausage of just the right low quality, a small hillock of chips and all between two jaunty speech marks of beans sitting on either side-a parted sea of beans thus requiring no pork breakwater. “Where is the bacon?” I hear you cry, a note of desperation no doubt creeping involuntarily into your voice. This was probably the best part of it. As I made an excavation (apologies for my mixed metaphors, one simply won’t cover it) down through the outer breakfast crust I probed for the missing pork seam, and there, as I hit the plate and had nearly given up hope, there was a curious spongy resistance. As I parted the top layer of breakfast I discovered that this particular masterpiece was painted on a canvas of bacon. Yes, the whole bottom of the plate was covered in this pork manna. What fabulous idea. Cover the entire plate in bacon and use the bacon to provide structural integrity of the whole thing! A move of pure creative engineering genius-had Brunel run a greasy spoon I feel certain he would have made his breakfasts in such a fashion. What a brilliant conclusion to a perfect breakfast. And here ends my love letter to the fry up.

Bonkers Food of the Week

Another delicious Chinese snack. You will love this. We have cheese and onion crisps, they have... Chilli flavoured chicken's feet! Mmmm. You can enter a corner shop anywhere in China and buy this lovely poultry  based snack. Me being me, I simply couldn't resist. They are pretty crunchy but also a little slimy at the same time, I don't think they are as bad as most westerners make out, but I also don't really understand the culinary gusto with which Chinese people enjoy them. Amusingly enough, I read a little while ago that the enormous population of China is so keen on this snack that countries in Europe are currently looking at exporting this particular poultry off cut toward the middle kingdom. Could this be a reverse in the usual flow of primary goods signalling the changing nature of the globalised economy starting in the poultry feet industry? One can only hope.  

Bonkers Music of the Week

A quick one this week, I've been a bit busy with various things. I just want to tell you about a band from Oxford in the UK. I had this slightly barmy friend (in the best possible way, in case you're reading this!) at school whose eccentricity was matched only by his intense interest in all things musical, but particularly the esoteric side of things. I guess he had a big effect on my approach to things concerning music and food. In any case this particular band are of interest because they were not just bonkers but very technically skilled too. They were called Nought and had (as far as I remember) a bassist, guitarist, drummer and cellist. I heard that one of their major influences was Igor Stravinsky, the early to mid twentieth century composer who was famous for The Rite of Spring and The Fire Bird amongst many others. Stravinksy is known for his innovative and intense style of music that used new rhythmical and tonal forms that really pushed the boundaries of contemporary composing. I think it's fair to say that Nought did this with their guitar driven music, it was very noisy indeed but also imaginatively arranged and made with passion. It's loud guitar music but with a cello involved and clearly defined mood changes, almost like movements in a symphony. It isn't for the faint of heart or those overly keen on preserving their aural health, but it certainly is on the bonkers side of things. It shares that intensity one feels when listening to The Rite of Spring, the kind of attack that make spasms go through your body from the shock of that electricity conveyed by the music, which feels you with musical vigor. The most bonkers part of their performance that I remember is James, their guitarist, using a drill with his guitar to make cacophonous accompaniments to Nought's often frenetic sound. I found a rather amusing clip of the late John Peel talking to James about this on his show Sound of the Suburbs, for which I'll post a link below. They are well worth a listen if you can find anything by them but, as I'm sure you can imagine, they missed the number one spot by a shade of a whisker so they're a bit difficult to find, like all the best music.

  

Here it is, the hilariously twee John Peel interviewing James.

And it turns out they're not that hard to find on Youtube after all...

Bonkers Music of the Week

This week's music is an old favourite of mine. I got in to this music before I got into any other dance music, but it is really derived from a dance music and punk background. The music in question is known as digital hardcore and was invented mainly by Alec Empire and other members of a band called Atari Teenage Riot from Berlin. It's often characterised by an extremely fast jungle break (a kind of looped drum and bass sounding beat that is usually at between 150 and 170 bpm, although I've got digital hardcore where it happily pounds along at 240 bpm-that's 4 beats per second!), crunchy production done on basic bits of software and hardware and sometimes screaming rebellious vocals. I believe the name Atari Teenage Riot comes from their use of Atari computers to sequence their music. 

Some digital hardcore has been highly influential for the development of breakcore and speedcore, I am particularly thinking of the 1993 release Bass Terror by Alec Empire and several later releases. No digital hardcore is what you could call chilled out, but it is quite varied. There are groups like Ec8or who produce generally 4/4 (with an unbroken beat-like house, although the unbroken beat is where the similarity ends) beat backed by furious breaks. Then there is Shizuo from the UK, this stuff is much slower and heavier, Sweat is a particular favourite of mine. There are some just down right hilarious groups too, like Lolita Storm who basically just scream incredibly lewd lyrics over scrunched up amen breaks (I'll be talking about amen breaks at some time in the future...). The reason I like this music so much is the inventiveness and DIY nature of it. People got a bunch of computers and hardware and invented a new form of music whilst holding true to a DIY punk ethos. If you want to hear a good selection of it have a listen to Harder than the Rest or Riot Zone, compilations put together on Digital Hardcore Recordings (DHR). 

  Some Ec8or to assault your ears

Some early Alec Empire

Shizuo-use speakers with a large amount of bass for the full effect

Bonkers Food of the Week

This week's bonkers food is from my very own mother country, Sweden. Well sort of, I was actually born in London but I've been going to Sweden two or three times a year for most of my life to see family and generally get away from the noisy chaos that England can be. The food in question is a fish dish. Not just any fish dish, however. Think way past its sell-by-date and you're getting close. It's called surströmming, which translates roughly as sour herring. Mmmmmm. So what they do is get some herring and 'ferment' it (read: let it go off in a controlled way) and tin it, there's even a festival to celebrate it, although knowing festivals you're probably drunk enough not to taste it once it deigns to violate your taste buds. Even I, with my taste for eating insects, have not dared to try this 'delicacy'. My mum describes it as having a soggy consistency and a foul smell, a book I'm currently looking at describes it as having a "pungent aroma". It's usually eaten with a flat bread and a variety of strong Swedish cheese called Västerbotten. I'm sure I will try it one day but for now I think I'll stick to skipjack and mayonnaise.  

Acid

Acid. What is it? Am I talking about something inside a battery? Am I talking about the infamous psychedelic drug enjoyed so much by Mr. Leary and many others in the sixties and beyond? No. That leaves two options given the nature of this blog, either citric acid (of not that much interest to me) or a term for a sound in music. For me it'll always be a passionate interest and has been a virtual obsession at other times.

Acid is in fact the name given to the noises created through a failed bass guitar synthesizer made by Roland at the beginning of the eighties. This synthesizer was called the TB-303 and is known most often known merely as a 303 or acid. All this sounds pretty inconsequential but it has in fact been massively influential in underground and overground music. This little box helped create whole new styles of music, alongside drum machines made by the same company such as the 606, 808 and 909. At some point in the early eighties various people in Chicago, amongst other places, got hold of this device and noticed that by deliberately not following the 90-page user manual they could tweak this machine to make a bizarre selection of noises with an acidic cutting kind of sound. In fact the there is an incredibly wide range of sounds that can be made with this versatile and unassuming little box. Soon people were making all kinds of crazy noises with it and it helped to give birth to a vibrant underground dance music scene in Chicago and Detroit. The best known early acid label for me is called Trax records and had such names as Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle producing music (Principle wrote Your Love, later famously covered by Candy Stanton) using acid noises. I love the use of acid in Fantasy Girl  and the aptly named Acid Trax by Phuture, you can really here that iconic squelch and cut. They are far from the earliest acid tracks, but they really give a good taste of that unique acid driven sound. 

During the eighties the 303 was used in hip-hop, hip-house, techno and house tracks and of course took the UK by storm in the infamous Summer of Love in 1988, when the UK, depending on your viewpoint, was ravaged or blessed by a proliferation of rave parties seemingly exploding from nowhere. This gave birth to a huge selection of acid house tracks in the UK, with such hilariously cheesy examples as Everything Starts With an E  by the E-Zee Possee and much higher quality and inventive tracks like Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald, a native of Moss Side in Manchester who took the rave scene by storm in 1988. Later on, as dance music took on a harder edge we saw the coming of hard Detroit techno and Underground Resistance, who offered us experimental but highly danceable tracks soaked in acid, such as Seawolf (UR 12-released 1992), a really driving track with several overlaid acid lines. What had become very apparent was the versatility and consequent inventive possibilities attached to this little box. This was also being exploited in the UK a couple of years earlier by LFO with their release of the same name on the eponymous IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) label Warp, later to host such trailblazers as Autechre et al.

So, perhaps the 303 was a fad that would start losing energy in after ten years or so of use? Far from it, in the mid nineties the UK started developing it's own unique acid techno sound. It should be noted that there was a lot of acid techno about before this, from Underground Resistance to Outlander and many others besides. Producers in the UK like Chris Liberator and Guy McAffer (sorry to all those I left out, there are lots!) took up the acid soaked torch and continued to develop this ravey sound in to a rising tranced out sound where the acid sound was used to create a euphoric build up, albeit based on a hard pounding beat usually between 140 and 160 bpm (beats per minute). Some of my early favourites include Glass Ball by Rebel Yelle and London Acid City by Lochi. At the same time and a little earlier the acid sound was utilised by people with a much harder and darker sound from the free party scene, like Spiral Tribe. UK acid techno quickly became darker and harder too. So, the 303 continued to be used to invent and push boundaries, being used in many other genres of dance music in an increasingly subtle and less squelchy way. It has continued to this day, enjoying a considerable rebirth in the genre Acid with such artists as Ceephax Acid Crew on the IDM label Reflex. I watched a documentary recently about the 303 (see below for a link) that pointed out its uses in even pop music, such as Ray of Light by Madonna, so next time you're listening to some pop that seems a little dance music influenced see if you can hear that tell tale squelch...

The 303 has been a massively fortunate accident then. I think what allowed this was experimentation on the part of the early pioneers, in the very way that created techno as a genre; it's versatility in creating a huge selection of noises that are to a greater or lesser extent experimental sounding; and its involvement in the explosion of dance music that took place in the late eighties and in many ways never really ended fully. One thing I've always thought is interesting about the 303 is its ability to concentrate on high piercing frequencies whilst apparently doing something low pitched at the same time. Perhaps this is my imagination or the outcome of multiple acid lines, someone with a better technical knowledge will have to enlighten me. The 303 actually went out of production pretty quickly but was relaunched as basically a 303 sample box (although by all accounts very effective) which had similar tweaking abilities and was called the MC 505 Groovebox and is now emulated by software like ReBirth created by Propellerhead. It seems amazing that an overly complex bass synthesizer has brought me so much joy, but the world is full of many lovely accidents.  

I'd just like to take a moment to apologise for the countless artists, labels and such that I've left out. I could probably bang on about this for 10,000 words, but alas life has other ideas. 

I've just put a few interesting links and artists below.

A documentary about the box in question.

An interview with Chris Liberator on Pheonix FM, a really interesting description of the coming of UK acid techno in its modern form:

http://www.graybo-photo.com/podcasts/phoenix/080113_Podcast.mp3

A mix of classic acid house tracks that made me want to write this.

A far from exhaustive list of some UK acid techno tracks I like

Fat Arse - D.A.V.E. the Drummer

New Wave of Acid Techno - Lochi

Santa Pod - Crash'n'Burn

Barbed Wire 303 -  D.A.V.E. the Drummer

Clawhammer - Temperature Drop 

Neurodancer -  Wippenberg

Glass Ball - Rebel Yelle

London Acid City - Lochi

Even if Now She's Got a Perm-Lawrie Immersion and Rowland the Bastard

Control - Secret Hero

Right, I wanted to post this, there's still lots I want to add in terms of tracks, I'll return for an edit later. 

Thanks for reading!

Bonkers Music of the Week

This week I want to tell you about another fantastic website I like very much. It's a website founded by a collective of musicians and music lovers, much of it coming from dance music but of the very underground variety. It's run by Ill FM, which is an internet radio station that you can also listen to at this address. I first heard of Ill FM through Pitchless, a sound system that played a fair bit in London at various underground events. They always interested me because their ethos seemed to be more to play what was odd, interesting and often downright bonkers rather than to stick to a genre or pure concentration on floor filling. A sort of avante garde rave soundsystem, I always thought. As you can imagine Ill Fm has aired many weird and wonderful sets over the years and, once again, they're all available for download here at zero cost. I'll be coming back to this favourite of mine in later posts.

There is one particular bonkers set that I've been listening to of late. It's a Terra Audio set and can be found by searching the archives sections for this: PITCHRAD #13 - TERRAAUDIO - REVERSE23
I'm not entirely sure how to describe this. It's a strange mixture of international music, noise and general ambient chaos. It's a bit like an experimental speedcore act doing a chill out room.
Anyway, here's a quotation from the artist introducing the set:
"Following the course of an underground river as it veers through the stars contained in the DNA of each cell of our bodies, the invisible night life and sensory apparatus of an otter's dreams merge off the sett in hologramophonic delight. From Shaolin to Drexciya we're planning our escapes. The process begins with an initial breath..."
So that rather interesting description should give you a taste of the esoteric nature of this mix. 

The Ill FM site is located at:

http://www.illfm.net/

I hope you enjoy this website as much as I do.