THE CLARENDONIANS--Rude Boy Gone A Jail HALL 'N' OATES--ICGFT3 PHAROAH MONCHE--Simon Says (Estaw Instrumental Mix) 808 STATE--Disco State DJ KRUSH FEAT. ANTICON--Song For John Walker (Sticky Mix) THE BUG FEAT. KILLA.P & FLOW DAN--Skeng ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI--Heart It Races (Trizzy's Rusty Tin Can Mix) ROBIN THICKE--Cocaine (Diplo Mix) MARY WELLS--Two Lovers BESSIE BANKS--Baby You Sure Know How To Get To Me DUDLEY PERKINS--War Going On (Instrumental) produced by Madlib BURIAL--Ghost Hardware BREAKAGE--Clarendon ANONYMOUS--Honest Brokers (from I Remember Syria) THE LOUVIN BROTHERS--Must You Throw Dirt In My Face PIGMEAT TERRY--Black Sheep Blues HANK WILLIAMS--Deck Of Cards
SOULFUL STRINGS--Within You Without You NATIONAL LAMPOON--Magical Misery Tour KATE--Strange Girl PREFUSE 73--The Classical Sounds Of 73 Bells (Ft. School Of Seven Bells) LOREZ ALEXANDRIA--I'm Wishin' PIERRE BACHELET & HERVE ROY--Emmanuelle Theme (Instrumental) KING TUBBY & ROOTS RADICS--King Tubby's Explosion Dub PIANO OVERLORD--Diplo Electric Manatee Final Mixdown (unreleased retake) DJ /RUPTURE--Sizzla-Obstacles; Seeed-Music Monks IVY QUEEN--Guillaera TS7--Bradford DIPLO--You Can Call Me Al NATURAL BRIDGE BUNCH--Pig Snoots, Pt. 1 TELLY SAVALAS--Side B, Band #3 (from Self-Portrait) THE CLASH--Straight To Hell M.I.A. FEAT. BUN B & RICH BOY--Paper Planes (Remix) WALIAS BAND--Muzikawi Silt SELDA--Yaylalar DONALD BYRD/MADLIB--Steppin' Again KALYANJI ANANDJI--Theme Music (Sad) IGNACE DE SOUZA--Melody Aces/Asaw Fofor THE FOCUS GROUP--Soho St. Ives Tangier
'Is that pork, coz I'm not allowed to have pork?' 'No love, it's spam', the dinner lady replied as she slid a thickish pink rectangle on to my plate. On other occasions, the slab of meat would come wrapped in deep fried golden batter.
I rarely eat red meat now, though some folks consider pork white meat. Never had a taste for bacon, not even the illicit nibble of a smoky bacon flavoured potato crisp. The smell of Robert Allen's bag of scratchings on the school bus at eight in the morning put me off crispy pork for life. But sometimes all you want is a sausage with the occasional big breakfast on a Sunday or some other holy day; a sausage that is just a sausage, and not a saucisse.
When I was a kid, we ate beef sausages for some years, nuancing our middle-class English knife-and-fork technique beyond early lessons on French toast. But when it was discovered that beef sausages contained some pork, they were banished from the freezer. The taste for the sausage didn't disappear, however. Years later the herbs and spices found in the continental sausages in American delis developed the sausage taste buds. The English banger now seemed a poor cousin. Kosher salami offered an halal compromise. There are many Muslims who will happily imbibe alcohol but continue to draw the line at pig meat. A friend of mine says that he has pork every now and then to prove that he's been deprogrammed from Islam. Just other day I was watching the second season of Weeds on DVD the other day and a middle-aged member of the Nation of Islam decried the pig as a filthy animal as he sat at the dining table of some black folks who grew up eating the swine. We were fed that same doctrine. We read Charlotte's Web, thought Pigsy in Monkey was cool, but real pigs with their scary snouts were to be avoided. They wallowed in shit and were friends of salmonella.
