Originally published 1 March, 2019
The Phnom Penh music scene, in the ten years or so that I’ve known it, has always been very supportive of specific genre bands. A time there was when the best room-filling bands in town were bluegrass (the original Grass Snake Union) or straight funk (Durian), and there was a string of tribute bands, including the Rolling Stones (Captain Jack) and Alice Cooper (Muscle of Love), not to mention Shambolic 69 and the long-running (still going!) Stiff Little Punks. My first venture into putting together bands was The Magical Mystery Tourists who did one show at The Cavern (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore) performing the entire Abbey Road album for its 40th anniversary.
And so it continues. Two of the most recent rush of specific genre bands play at Oscar’s on the Corner in a double header on Friday night, the South East Asia Soul Revue and new budding ska outfit Checkered Past, led by scene veteran Jon Banules on bass, fronted by not-so-newly-arrived singer Ariane Parkes.
I sat down with Ariane to learn more about the band and the music. Firstly, what is ska, and where did it come from? “Ska was invented on the beautiful island of Jamaica. It has the typical Jamaican offbeat that most people know from reggae music, but ska was earlier than reggae. Ska is dancing music, and the legend says one summer it was so hot that people didn’t want to dance anymore, and the music got slower and slower, and so there was rock steady, and then came reggae. So it’s a faster version of reggae with many horns.”
The genesis of Checkered Past in the second half of last year worked in that standard Phnom Penh way: friends of friends – in the end consolidating with a Brit, a Czech, two Americans, two Australians, and a German with Jamaican heritage. “Jon wanted to play ska music, and was talking to a mutual friend about it, and she knew that I had a past in ska music, and she connected us. Apart from [drummer] Mike Forster and myself, the other band members don’t have a lot of ska experience, and come from really different backgrounds, which is also nice because you get lots of different influences into the music.”
Ariane’s own experience in ska goes deep. “I spent many, many, many years listening to ska music, first when I was very young I started listening to the styles, punkish styles from England from the late 70s, like The Specials and Madness. And after that there were a lot of German bands, and of course sooner or later I had to like the Jamaican stuff as well. Although at the beginning I thought oh, this is far too slow and too boring, but now I really, really like it too. And there’s American ska music.”
A significant shift came in 2006 when Ariane responded to an advertisement by Berlin ska band Port Royal, who were looking for a singer. “I played my first concert with them a few weeks later. 90% of our gigs were in Berlin, but we went to England and we went to Poland, and played a few big festivals in Germany as well. And we made an album, Royal Flush.” She played 142 gigs with them until her relocation to Cambodia in 2017.
Checkered Past reflects their diversity in the song list. “We try to pick songs to play from Europe, from Jamaica, from the US, and different styles from different decades that we all play,” says Ariane. “So we now have songs from Jamaica from the 60s, we have songs from England from the 70s and then 90s stuff from the US, and Europe again. Also in different languages – we sing in German, Spanish, English and French.”
Checkered Past will kick off the night at Oscar’s on Friday March 1, to be followed by the South East Asia Soul Revue.