MIKI ANTONY & TOM PARKER / IRVING MARTIN & BRIAN DEE

• Heavy rock
• Bruton Music
• 1978
• UK

I bought this way back from a record fair for two euros. I bought it because it was cheap, it was published by Bruton and it sounded suspicious. Little did I know that there was actually a really great bboy track with breaks and all plus some other really great songs too. I guess one should never judge a record by it’s cover (or the title).

Bruton Music is a London based library music label that was founded in 1977 by Robin Phillips and is still functioning to this day. They have a really wide variety of music from action themes to classical and everything in between. Bruton Music has also a sublabel called Peer International, that have a small amount of releases and almost all of them are pretty good. Bruton Music was briefly owned (from 1982 to 1985) by the king of pop himself, Michael Jackson, who was a fan of their releases. Many of the releases by Bruton sounded like they’re straight from some British cop series from the 1970s with compositions minding of chase scenes and other action or dramatic sequences. But not this one. I’m not sure what they even meant when naming this album Heavy rock, because this ain’t even close to the term heavy rock as we know it. Although this was not originally brought up by Bruton, but it was first released by a small production library company called The Regency Line in 1975. Anyways, maybe back then in 1975 heavy rock meant guitar driven heavy groove, because that’s what this album is about. And that guitar work still disturbs me a little.

Miki Antony and Tom Parker were responsible for all the songs in side A. While Tom Parker is a pretty well known multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger, Miki Antony instead seems to be mostly a session musician involved mainly with library music only. Together they did anyways the best track on this album, magnificent rock’ish afrofunk track “Portugalia” with wailing fuzz guitars and a quite long percussion break in the middle. Other ones on the first side ain’t bad either, electric guitar driven funky library music in general. For example uptempo bboy/chase funk track “Tension in the city”, uptempo half minute percussion beat “The mysteries of Mars” and the midtempo funk groover “Dirty Rat”. All tracks except the last one on side B were composed by the accomplished library music duo Irving Martin and Brian Dee, who were involved with other library labels too. Their side is a little different from the A side. It varies more from bluesy and mellow easy listening to pace rhythms and even reggae. Their best track is fast beat track “Havin’ a ball”. There’s also one song composed by Norman Warren on the B side called “C for Charlie”, and what a song it is. Really cool and mellow funk track as a balance to this otherwise hectic album. The only minus is that most of the songs are only minute or so long as it’s normal for the library albums. At least six of the tracks from this album was used in the British police drama series The Sweeney.

Miki Antony & Tom Parker - Portugalia

Miki Antony & Tom Parker - Tension in the city

Miki Antony & Tom Parker - Dirty rat

Miki Antony & Tom Parker - The mysteries of Mars

Irving Martin & Brian Dee - Havin’ a ball

Norman Warren - C for Charlie