The Artists on the Frequency — the station's own singers, bands and sound systems. One act at a time; pick a name to hear who they are.
Cassie Linton
Streatham, SW16 — the High Road, the ice rink and the last 159 home.
Cassie Linton is Streatham through and through: a flat off Mitcham Lane with a fifty-pence gas meter, Saturdays on the counter at Pratt's on the High Road, and a first kiss at sixteen going round and round Streatham Ice Rink to whatever the rink DJ was playing. She sang in the school choir and then in anyone's front room that had a piano, and by 1983 she was cutting bright British boogie — LinnDrum, Rhodes, Clavinet, a warm Juno — with a voice that stays soft when everyone around her is shouting. Restraint is the whole trick. She never belts; the group harmonies do the lifting.
The songs are the small print of SW16 life: the end-of-the-month sums on the back of the rent book, the Friday brown envelope, the top deck of the last 159 down from the West End with the whole of South London sliding past in sodium orange. Pirate Frequency is the tower-block aerial she knew the lads who ran; Winter on the High Road is the lights coming on at half past three and Nan's kettle waiting. Hard times, head up.
Key tracksStreatham Ice · Last One Off the 159 · Pirate Frequency · Meter's Running
- Roots
- Streatham, SW16, South London
- In the lineage of
- Linx, Central Line, Imagination, Loose Ends