Second Light

Second Light (subtitled "An Original Dreadzone Sound Adventure") is the second album by the British band Dreadzone. It was released on Virgin Records in 1995. John Peel had already supported their first album, 360°, giving it heavy airplay; similarly for Second Light, which he cited as one of his favourite albums of all time, and the album was heavily represented in the Festive Fifty for 1995.^[2] Dreadzone tracks appeared at #5 ("Zion Youth"), #9 ("Maximum"), #16 ("Fight the Power"), #23 ("Little Britain"), #35 ("Captain Dread") and #48 ("Life, Love & Unity").^[3]

Four tracks became UK chart hits: "Zion Youth" & "Captain Dread" (both #49), "Little Britain" (#20) and "Life, Love & Unity" (#56).^[4]

Track listing

1. "Life, Love and Unity" (Williams, Roberts) (5:43)
2. "Little Britain" (5:14)
3. "A Canterbury Tale" (Roberts) (8:40)
4. "Captain Dread" (5:16)
5. "Cave of Angels" (Williams, Bran, Roberts) (6:13)
6. "Zion Youth" (6:05)
7. "One Way" (Roberts, Bran) (6:00)
8. "Shining Path" (Williams, Roberts) (7:22)
9. "Out of Heaven" (Roberts) (5:57)

Samples & influences

Greg Roberts has said in interview that

"You hear something within a tune which excites you and which you feel that you can do something with. I like having a base to start from and a musical or a melodic idea that conjures up and puts you in a certain mood. I will always use samples. They start off most of our songs. When it comes to dialogue, I think the best dialogue comes from simply watching a lot of films and thinking, "That sounds nice." and "It is fun working with samples ... except when you have to sit down with people and work out deals."^[5]

• "Life, Love and Unity" contains a sample from "Disco Dub" by Johnny Clarke.^[6] The female voices saying "hello" at the beginning of the track are sampled from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• "Little Britain" contains dialogue from Lindsay Anderson's film if.... of the headmaster showing off his school: "Britain today is a powerhouse of ideas, experiments, imagination"; the line "You and the land are one!" is spoken by Perceval (Paul Geoffrey) to King Arthur (Nigel Terry) in the 1981 film Excalibur. The introductory bars are from an unidentified piece by Purcell while the rest of the track relies heavily on Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.
• "A Canterbury Tale" features dialogue samples from Powell and Pressburger's 1944 film of the same title, including "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that?", spoken by Sheila Sim (as Alison Smith, while riding on a horse and cart past a large country house); the music uses extracts from Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending.
• "Captain Dread" contains samples from "The King of Ballyhooley" by Patrick Street and "Bostich" by Yello; also a snatch of the song "I want to be a sailor" from the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad: "I want to be a sailor sailing out to sea, No plowboy, tinker, tailor's any fun to be". The line "All right my hearties, follow me!" is spoken by Errol Flynn in the 1935 film Captain Blood.^[7] Also featured is an extract from Derek Walcott's poem "The Schooner Flight":

  "You ever look up from some lonely beach and see a far schooner? Well, when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech my common language go be the wind, my pages the sails of the schooner "Flight". But let me tell you how this business begin".^[8]

• "Zion Youth" contains a sample from "Dread Lion" by Scratch & The Upsetters and dialogue from the film Rockers spoken by Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace:

  "No matter what the weak heart say. And I know that I & I is like a tree, plant by the river of water, and not even the dog that piss against the wall of Babylon shall escape this judgment. For I & I know that all of the youth shall witness the day that Babylon shall fall!".^[9]

• "Shining Path": at the end of this track, the child on the beach saying "over here" is taken from the 1967 film Far from the Madding Crowd.
• "Out of Heaven" contains a sample from "Before Long" by Ryuichi Sakamoto and an inexact extract from The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert W. Service:

  "while high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars"^[10]

Personnel

• Greg Roberts - drums
• Tim Bran - unknown
• Leo Williams - Bass guitar
• featuring

Dan Donovan - additional keyboards

Earl Sixteen - vocals on tracks 1 & 6

Donna McKevitt - vocals on tracks 3 & 9; viola on track 2

• Vicky Bogal - created the stained glass window featured on the album cover
• Love, Respect and Admiration are also expressed towards a long list of friends & influences.

References

1. ^ Second Light at Allmusic
2. ^ "Jon Dennis analyses John Peel's top 20 albums". London: guardian.co.uk. 2005-10-12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/oct/12/johnpeel.popandrock. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 
3. ^ "BBC - Radio 1 - Keeping It Peel - Festive 50s - 1995". www.bbc.co.uk. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/johnpeel/festive50s/1990s/1995/. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 
4. ^ "Chart Stats - Dreadzone". www.chartstats.com. http://www.chartstats.com/artistinfo.php?id=7399. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 
5. ^ "Dreadzone : Interview". www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk. http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Article.aspx?id=5351. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 
6. ^ "Dreadzone - Second Light (CD, Album) at Discogs". www.discogs.com. http://www.discogs.com/Dreadzone-Second-Light/release/50132. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 
7. ^ Although the line was later used in The Goonies, the version sampled is Flynn's
8. ^ "The Schooner 'Flight' - Poem by Derek Walcott". famouspoetsandpoems.com. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/derek_walcott/poems/11253. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 
9. ^ "Rockers (1978) - Memorable quotes". www.imdb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079815/quotes. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 
10. ^ "The Shooting of Dan McGrew - Wikisource". en.wikisource.org. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Shooting_of_Dan_McGrew. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 

External references

http://www.dreadzone.org.uk/