Richy Pitch

Richy Pitch

25 August, 2010
by: Trol23

Tomas Olesen talks to Richy Pitch about his brilliant new album.

Sometimes albums come along that shine more brightly than the rest and end up being 'that' CD – the one that becomes the soundtrack to your summer festival missions in over-packed cars. That CD that you recommend to everyone with a smug confidence, the album that doesn't leave the CD player even though you've got a pile of other albums to review and really you shouldn't still be listening to it. This is one of those albums. Richy Pitch, who is probably best known as resident DJ of long running hip hop night Scratch, disappeared off to Ghana for a couple of years and came back with a musical document of his time there – 'Ye Fre Mi Richy Pitch'.

The intro features a sample of the pilot's announcement on landing in Accra, and his “welcome to Ghana” is a really appropriate way to start the album because right from Kwesi Dankwa's opening guitar riffs you're immediately transported to the land of highlife, hiplife, and afrobeat. All of which seem a million miles away from Richy's musical roots in 1980s Britain.

“The first record I bought, well the first album I bought, was by Planet Patrol, an electro album from the same era as Planet Rock. But at that time I was also buying a lot of cassette singles, and the first tape I bought was 'Buffalo Girls' by Malcom Maclaren, who unfortunately passed away recently. I've pretty much been into hip hop music since it first emerged in the '80s. The thing that first really inspired me though was 'The Message' by Grandmaster Flash. The combination of really thought provoking, quite hard hitting lyrics and the breaks they were using was something I'd never heard before.”

Richy clearly seems to revel in immersing himself in new sounds. He admits his knowledge of highlife, and its descendant hiplife, was relatively limited before his time in Ghana. But that would soon change, and in fact one of the album highlights is the appearance on 'Visa Connection Man' of Reggie Rockstone, who's considered the godfather of hiplife music. Vinyl is not easy to come by in Ghana as there aren't record shops anymore and it's a relatively hostile environment for records. Whilst they don't quite melt, “they do warp and get very dusty.” With the help of, amongst other people, a local taxi driver, Richy did, however, acquire enough records to gain an education in the classics.

What's immediately striking is that Richy Pitch hasn't made a hip hop album just by sampling those local records, as, say, Oh No did on his ‘Ethiopium’ album recently – which was ultimately fitting African sounds into a Western paradigm. Here Richy Pitch has sampled Ghana.

“I deliberately set out to try and get the sound of what I thought Ghana was musically. Ultimately it was the musicians who influenced the sound, and made it sound like afrobeat or highlife. I just added the drums, bass-lines and keys to compliment that really.”

It's an important distinction because this isn't really a hip hop album per se. There are certainly elements of hip hop and dancehall, but this is just a result of it being, as it says on the cover, “a musical journey to Ghana through the ears of a producer from London”. What one gets therefore is a highlife/hiplife/afrobeat album with UK production sensibilities that give it swagger.

This is a live album, and all the artists, from Long John's fantastic bugle playing to Michael Kweku Owusu's all-pervading percussion, put in star turns, and this before we even talk about the rappers and singers. Richy is keen at all times to credit everyone involved, people like DJ Black from Joy FM in Accra who along with Wanlov the Kubolor, M3NSA and Accra promoter PY, became his gateway into this community of Ghanaian artists.

"The nice thing about Accra is that (because it's quite small compared to somewhere like London) once you've met one person, you meet everyone...and as long as your beats are to a standard people like then everyone is willing to work with you."

Richy has a light touch as a producer, and it's the Ghanaian artists who shine through at all times. M3NSA has the most airtime on the album and he's an amazing talent: good flow with conscious lyrics. Wanlov the Kubolor is also a really good rapper, and on the tracks they appear on together there's great chemistry. Other than the hiplife master Reggie Rockstone the other stand-out talent is Yasmeen who appears on the track 'Dey Suffer'. It starts with just her and a drum before breaking into an up tempo jazzy number. The lyrical content, about Ghanaians not abandoning their motherland, is powerful and sung with real passion despite her laid-back style.

Richy Pitch has had an enviable career as a DJ. Through his residency at Scratch he's played with some of the true greats of hip hop: people like Eminem, and the Black Eyed Peas before either were particularly well known. He describes nights with Souls of Mischief on stage, and Jeru tha Damaja and Macy Gray just turning up on the door to jam too. He's had library music featured on Oprah, and is currently writing a book on beat-making. But despite all his success in the 'Big Smoke', it's a sojourn in Ghana that has brought out his best work to date.

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Trol23