If you're in the mood to feel disturbed by the British music scene, a glance at the album chart usually does the trick. Sure enough, this year's bestsellers have provided plenty of reason for gloom about our ability to produce forward-looking music. Two big successes so far this year have been Mika and Amy Winehouse: a man who would have us think he is the reincarnation of Freddie Mercury and a woman invoking the spirits of Motown to make what could have been the last great soul album of the 1960s.

Ciaran "Simple Kid" McFeely doesn't think so. "The way 16-year-olds are thinking with computers," he says, "that's got to lead to something different - some sort of crazy mathematical musical matrix." Morley is inclined to agree. "There is a world," he suggests, "where, when people say, 'Where are the new Beatles?' the answer is the internet."

"We've got the new thing - we just haven't been looking in the right place for it."

"I think nutrition is very important. If you eat bad, you feel bad. If you feel bad, you do bad things. Most of modern rock and roll is a product of guilt. People cop licks off of dead people, like stealing pennies off a dead man's eyes. The movement needs a bowel movement."

"I don't do lullabyes. I'm tired of lullabyes, like The Beatles. I heard *Lullabye of Broadway* when I was a baby, and I still hear it now, and I'm still a baby. We're the only people doing anything significant in modern music. I haven't heard anything else that gets away from mother's heartbeat. All I've heard is a rebelling against parents, and I'm tired of hearing that."

"I don't believe in time, you know, 4/4 and all that stuff," Beefheart says. "Frank Zappa believes in time and we could never get it together. He writes all his music and gets sentimental about good old rock 'n' roll, but that's appeasement music."

... Then, the full band returns, and we finally get to a theme, a clear, orderly melody - one that was to become very popular as the song "Night Train." First the saxes have it, with the brass answering staccato. Next, while the sax section plays high, shrieking chords, Cat Anderson plays the melody and answers himself with a very high rip, like the call of the train’s conductor saying "all aboard!" This music is so different from how I was--it’s that very obstruction that makes for the happy go lucky feeling!

"Night Train" is a twelve bar blues instrumental standard first recorded by Jimmy Forrest in 1951. Other famous recordings of the tune were made by James Brown and Oscar Peterson.

"Night Train" has a long and complicated history. The piece's familiar opening riff was first recorded in 1940 by a small group led by Duke Ellington sideman Johnny Hodges under the title "That's the Blues, Old Man." Ellington used the same riff as the opening and closing theme of a longer-form composition, "Happy-Go-Lucky Local," that was itself one of four parts of his Deep South Suite.

Forrest was part of Ellington's band when it performed this composition, which has a long tenor saxophone break in the middle. After leaving Ellington, Forrest recorded "Night Train" on United Records and had a major rhythm & blues hit. While "Night Train" employs the same riff as the earlier recordings, it is used in a much earthier R&B setting. Forrest inserted his own solo over a stop-time rhythm not used in the Ellington composition. He put his own stamp on the tune, but its relation to the earlier composition is obvious.

Several different sets of lyrics were subsequently written for the tune of "Night Train". The earliest, written in 1952 by Oscar Washington and Lewis P. Simpkins, was a typical blues lament of a man who regrets treating his woman badly now that she's left him. Eddie Jefferson recorded a version with more optimistic lyrics about a woman returning to her man on the night train.

James Brown's recording of "Night Train" (which he made in 1962) credited Washington and Simpkins but replaced their lyrics with a list of American cities (mostly in the Southern United States) which Brown shouted out along with many repetitions of the tune's name.

The 45 King first gained fame with his breakbeat track "The 900 Number" in 1987. The song featured a looping tenor sax solo from Marva Whitney's "Unwind Yourself". The 45 King was signed to Tuff City Records that year and given a production deal. The "900 Number' remains his signature work having been resampled by many artists he was also featured on "1989-Hustlers Convention" album on the UK label Music Of Life considered by many to be rap's first ever live album.

In 1996 Washington, D.C. based Go-go DJ, DJ Kool scored a big hit with the song "Let Me Clear My Throat." It was simply call-and-response vocals over the "900 Number" beat, but was popular nationwide. DJ Kool didn't just sample the track, he acknowledged the 45 King's as the song's originator, and the 45 King even remixed the track for Kool.