Just received this today, before its supposed date of publication! 300 or so pages, 23 writers, including many vital voices:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Resistible-Demise-Michael-Jackson/dp/1846943485
Some more fine work from a publisher that doesn't talk down to its readers, nor intimidates. Accessible, eloquent polemics for these times:
'Where have the interesting women gone?'
http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Dimensional-Woman-Nina-Power/dp/1846942411/ref=pd_sim_b_3
A European Modernism reclaimed and asserted
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Militant-Modernism-Zero-Books-Hatherley/dp/1846941768/ref=pd_sim_b_5
'A ruthless portrait of our ideological misery'
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Capitalist-Realism-There-No-Alternative/dp/1846943175/ref=pd_sim_b_1
N.P. The Jacksons, 'Show You the Way to Go' (1976)
Friday, 27 November 2009
Monday, 23 November 2009
1968 in twelve steps
MARGO GURYAN, 'Think of Rain'
Divine, heavenly; for me her finest song and seemingly much covered according to YouTube at least. One trembles to think what the likes of Scott Walker, Brian Wilson or Basil Kirchin could have done with this sublime song. Though perhaps a lot of its deathless charm is how unassuming it is; she clearly didn't want to be a star or Margo's version is not on YT, hence this version from the same year by Claudine Longet. It's not up there with the original but sticks sensitively to its contours, suggesting a bountiful fusion of Paris and New York:
THE SOFT MACHINE - Joy of a Toy
Name of the following year's superlative album from initial Soft Machine member Ayers - present on this debut record. This starts off with aqueous guitars paddlingly languidly, moored by echoing, slightly dub-anticipating percussion, which gradually builds pace and the guitar starts to sear. It all comes to a precisely lurching close, to lead to a Wyatt-voiced piece not heard here.
CARAVAN - Love Song with Flute
Tell me the flute doesn't work in music, then listen to this! Or indeed Ambrose Campbell's 'Yolanda' from the same year. Doleful, plangent chords back a Wyatt-like voice, then gloriously uplifting organ enters; then, careful movement between the celebratory and the rueful. Lovely move into bossa nova from 1:38*, and then back to more Soft Machine territory, then the entrance of the flute finally at 2:45, beautifully withheld, and never more yearning than here, other than perhaps in certain 70s TV themes and Alessi's 'Oh Lori'.
* This list is shamefully lacking any Brazillian dimension.
HARRY NILSSON - One
I could equally go for 'Wailing of the Willow' - with more incisive use of bossa nova to join the above record - but that isn't on YouTube. This is pared-down cousin in its electric-piano jabbing melancholy, making points ne'er truer. Whilst he is searching for a foothold, trying all sorts of hats out on some of his 1967-9 work, on several tracks Nilsson is fully, even exquisitely formed: 'Sleep Late, My Lady Friend', 'Without Her', [the obvious one], 'Don't Leave Me', 'I Will Take You There', 'Open Your Window', 'Maybe', plus the two aforementioned.
I was once (c.2003/4) going to write a piece on Nilsson for Stylus, a discerning, now-defunct online music site, of the Freaky Trigger / Pitchfork variety. It never happened, was clearly never meant to be (despite the extensive close-listening I did at the time - notes from which I retain); it might just surface on here at some stage. I hold his music as dearly as subtly kindred spirits Scott Walker and Todd Rundgren, and that is saying something.
SCOTT WALKER - Plastic Palace People
That obviously has to lead to this, a cathedral of a record; chandeliers in tower blocks and all that. Intoxicating indeed, as a YouTube commentator puts it; an epic immersion in pure music that would be venerated as 'Hey Jude' if we were a truly European country. Intensely eerie yet beautiful, surreal yet bedsit-sink, this brings on thoughts of the best of 1968's cinema, where Europe, Britain and America did not seem so far apart: The Flat (Jan Svankmajer, CZE), Petulia (Richard Lester, USA), Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, USA), If... (Lindsay Anderson, UK), Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney, UK), Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, UK), Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, USA), Rocky Road to Dublin (Peter Lennon, IRE/FRA).
THE PRETTY THINGS - Defecting Grey
'And all the flowers ain't for picking
They're just for standing in line'
And another of the grand gestures of this year of stalled revolution. The title might just suggest The Prisoner, or, even more elliptically, Episode Six's 'Gentlemen of the Park', as discussed a few months back. Of course, this record does not target a grey conformity but rather obliterates it. Visceral, whimsical, fearless, this pioneering, decimating record must simply be listened to to be appreciated. It is a truly ramshackle, stupendous imagining - its only real analogue being Pink Floyd's 'Apples and Oranges / Paintbox' single (1967). Note the brutalist morse code usage of the sitar and truly apocalyptic twisting of the 1968 'rock' organ:
JEAN LE FENNEC - L'Abandon
'Mes Enfants D'Autre Part' is perhaps my favourite from this Frenchman's utter curio of a 1968 record, appositely named Phantastic, closest to Polnareff's in its blissfully schizoid spirit, but this is a cracking opener, disorientating and confounding. Another fresh interpretation of psychedelia, with a unapologetically Gallic helmsman; striking application of delay to the vocals.
KEITH WEST - Sam
I simply must include some Mark Wirtz, but assume (perhaps wrongly) that everyone knows 'Excerpt from a Teenage Opera' (aka. 'Grocer Jack'), and cannot find. This is technically a 1967 christmas single, but well, I think it fits rather better into its following year. A summation of English eccentricity, clearly born of that Harold Wilson-era London of Fletcher, Cohen and Nairn; the city and its inhabitants caught between an old world refusing quite to succumb and a new one being rather grudgingly born. It is an Old England record ambivalent at best about the future, almost uncannily prophetic of 'a last run' before the sort of homogenising forces identified by Paul Kingsnorth in Real England.
BASIL KIRCHIN - Theme from 'The Strange Affair'
Remarkably evocative footage from the opening of David Greene's film, perfectly in keeping with the strains of Kirchin's astonishing music - like the opening of The Mutations (1974), a ghastly film overall but with this time-lapse photography opening sequence that, backed with Kirchin's music, defines the 60s/70s public realm (experimentation in the most commonplace, the interface between technology and nature, science and the Weird) almost as much as the opening sequences of The Clangers or Bagpuss. This here footage captures the British city (presumably London) in the state of decay and renewal documented in The London Nobody Knows, eerie vestiges of Victoriana clinging on. As in the aforementioned Norman Cohen film, this ends with images of the gleaming New, represented by modernist housing. The music is ethereal, overpoweringly autumnal; typically searching, restive chords that frankly I haven't heard anyone else tap into like this man can:
THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND - Waltz of the New Moon
The new moon, the oldest. This seems to me of the 1968 moment, though it emerges from a left-traditionalism I would sense not entirely compatible with the urban / university-based New Left that was coalescing. Such enveloping visions, such possibilities. I could have selected any really from their LP of this year, but this seems to demand its place at the moment.
13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS - May the Circle Remain Unbroken
An epitaph in two parts, the dream faded. Back to the aqueous feel of the Soft Machine's 'Joy of a Toy', an unassuming withdrawal from the dizzying activity of previous entries in this litany. There's something of the spirit of Delia Derbyshire and Raymond Scott in this, in the pre-synthesizer synthetics, the manipulation of tape and sounds that is infinitely weirder and more uncanny. The assassinations of King, Robert Kennedy and the pivotal result of the 1968 US Presidential election come to mind... George Wallace and the vengeful Deep South seemingly resurgent, Nixon just getting in... bleakness setting in. The realisation that, whilst LBJ was badly wrong on Vietnam, he made strides domestically that simply have not been matched since in American politics... It might be pertinent to note that the Elevators' home state was the same as LBJ - Texas, now so synonymous with the worst of America...
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - Love Song for the Dead Che
'At the dawn of an ordinary Sunday
I remember the taste of you, sweet in my mouth,
Late in the year.
And in the stillness of the Oriente rainfall
I remember the warmth of you, still in my arms,
Late, late in the year.
I will bring to you flowers in the night
Soft as trembling fingers touch you--love,
I can offer you wine and candlelight
Late in the year.
Late in the year.'
This was of course written in the aftermath of another death - Guevara's in October, 1967 - but can be used to apply more broadly to the ideals of the 1960s. Such beauty, poignancy and understanding of what could not quite come to pass. It is quite a corrective to the unthinking adoption of Guevara as consumerist 'icon' for today; this is not just about what Che meant then, but sums up the potential inherent in a new generation that was about to be forced back into line by the forces of reaction.
Divine, heavenly; for me her finest song and seemingly much covered according to YouTube at least. One trembles to think what the likes of Scott Walker, Brian Wilson or Basil Kirchin could have done with this sublime song. Though perhaps a lot of its deathless charm is how unassuming it is; she clearly didn't want to be a star or Margo's version is not on YT, hence this version from the same year by Claudine Longet. It's not up there with the original but sticks sensitively to its contours, suggesting a bountiful fusion of Paris and New York:
THE SOFT MACHINE - Joy of a Toy
Name of the following year's superlative album from initial Soft Machine member Ayers - present on this debut record. This starts off with aqueous guitars paddlingly languidly, moored by echoing, slightly dub-anticipating percussion, which gradually builds pace and the guitar starts to sear. It all comes to a precisely lurching close, to lead to a Wyatt-voiced piece not heard here.
CARAVAN - Love Song with Flute
Tell me the flute doesn't work in music, then listen to this! Or indeed Ambrose Campbell's 'Yolanda' from the same year. Doleful, plangent chords back a Wyatt-like voice, then gloriously uplifting organ enters; then, careful movement between the celebratory and the rueful. Lovely move into bossa nova from 1:38*, and then back to more Soft Machine territory, then the entrance of the flute finally at 2:45, beautifully withheld, and never more yearning than here, other than perhaps in certain 70s TV themes and Alessi's 'Oh Lori'.
* This list is shamefully lacking any Brazillian dimension.
HARRY NILSSON - One
I could equally go for 'Wailing of the Willow' - with more incisive use of bossa nova to join the above record - but that isn't on YouTube. This is pared-down cousin in its electric-piano jabbing melancholy, making points ne'er truer. Whilst he is searching for a foothold, trying all sorts of hats out on some of his 1967-9 work, on several tracks Nilsson is fully, even exquisitely formed: 'Sleep Late, My Lady Friend', 'Without Her', [the obvious one], 'Don't Leave Me', 'I Will Take You There', 'Open Your Window', 'Maybe', plus the two aforementioned.
I was once (c.2003/4) going to write a piece on Nilsson for Stylus, a discerning, now-defunct online music site, of the Freaky Trigger / Pitchfork variety. It never happened, was clearly never meant to be (despite the extensive close-listening I did at the time - notes from which I retain); it might just surface on here at some stage. I hold his music as dearly as subtly kindred spirits Scott Walker and Todd Rundgren, and that is saying something.
SCOTT WALKER - Plastic Palace People
That obviously has to lead to this, a cathedral of a record; chandeliers in tower blocks and all that. Intoxicating indeed, as a YouTube commentator puts it; an epic immersion in pure music that would be venerated as 'Hey Jude' if we were a truly European country. Intensely eerie yet beautiful, surreal yet bedsit-sink, this brings on thoughts of the best of 1968's cinema, where Europe, Britain and America did not seem so far apart: The Flat (Jan Svankmajer, CZE), Petulia (Richard Lester, USA), Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, USA), If... (Lindsay Anderson, UK), Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney, UK), Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, UK), Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, USA), Rocky Road to Dublin (Peter Lennon, IRE/FRA).
THE PRETTY THINGS - Defecting Grey
'And all the flowers ain't for picking
They're just for standing in line'
And another of the grand gestures of this year of stalled revolution. The title might just suggest The Prisoner, or, even more elliptically, Episode Six's 'Gentlemen of the Park', as discussed a few months back. Of course, this record does not target a grey conformity but rather obliterates it. Visceral, whimsical, fearless, this pioneering, decimating record must simply be listened to to be appreciated. It is a truly ramshackle, stupendous imagining - its only real analogue being Pink Floyd's 'Apples and Oranges / Paintbox' single (1967). Note the brutalist morse code usage of the sitar and truly apocalyptic twisting of the 1968 'rock' organ:
JEAN LE FENNEC - L'Abandon
'Mes Enfants D'Autre Part' is perhaps my favourite from this Frenchman's utter curio of a 1968 record, appositely named Phantastic, closest to Polnareff's in its blissfully schizoid spirit, but this is a cracking opener, disorientating and confounding. Another fresh interpretation of psychedelia, with a unapologetically Gallic helmsman; striking application of delay to the vocals.
KEITH WEST - Sam
I simply must include some Mark Wirtz, but assume (perhaps wrongly) that everyone knows 'Excerpt from a Teenage Opera' (aka. 'Grocer Jack'), and cannot find. This is technically a 1967 christmas single, but well, I think it fits rather better into its following year. A summation of English eccentricity, clearly born of that Harold Wilson-era London of Fletcher, Cohen and Nairn; the city and its inhabitants caught between an old world refusing quite to succumb and a new one being rather grudgingly born. It is an Old England record ambivalent at best about the future, almost uncannily prophetic of 'a last run' before the sort of homogenising forces identified by Paul Kingsnorth in Real England.
BASIL KIRCHIN - Theme from 'The Strange Affair'
Remarkably evocative footage from the opening of David Greene's film, perfectly in keeping with the strains of Kirchin's astonishing music - like the opening of The Mutations (1974), a ghastly film overall but with this time-lapse photography opening sequence that, backed with Kirchin's music, defines the 60s/70s public realm (experimentation in the most commonplace, the interface between technology and nature, science and the Weird) almost as much as the opening sequences of The Clangers or Bagpuss. This here footage captures the British city (presumably London) in the state of decay and renewal documented in The London Nobody Knows, eerie vestiges of Victoriana clinging on. As in the aforementioned Norman Cohen film, this ends with images of the gleaming New, represented by modernist housing. The music is ethereal, overpoweringly autumnal; typically searching, restive chords that frankly I haven't heard anyone else tap into like this man can:
THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND - Waltz of the New Moon
The new moon, the oldest. This seems to me of the 1968 moment, though it emerges from a left-traditionalism I would sense not entirely compatible with the urban / university-based New Left that was coalescing. Such enveloping visions, such possibilities. I could have selected any really from their LP of this year, but this seems to demand its place at the moment.
13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS - May the Circle Remain Unbroken
An epitaph in two parts, the dream faded. Back to the aqueous feel of the Soft Machine's 'Joy of a Toy', an unassuming withdrawal from the dizzying activity of previous entries in this litany. There's something of the spirit of Delia Derbyshire and Raymond Scott in this, in the pre-synthesizer synthetics, the manipulation of tape and sounds that is infinitely weirder and more uncanny. The assassinations of King, Robert Kennedy and the pivotal result of the 1968 US Presidential election come to mind... George Wallace and the vengeful Deep South seemingly resurgent, Nixon just getting in... bleakness setting in. The realisation that, whilst LBJ was badly wrong on Vietnam, he made strides domestically that simply have not been matched since in American politics... It might be pertinent to note that the Elevators' home state was the same as LBJ - Texas, now so synonymous with the worst of America...
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - Love Song for the Dead Che
'At the dawn of an ordinary Sunday
I remember the taste of you, sweet in my mouth,
Late in the year.
And in the stillness of the Oriente rainfall
I remember the warmth of you, still in my arms,
Late, late in the year.
I will bring to you flowers in the night
Soft as trembling fingers touch you--love,
I can offer you wine and candlelight
Late in the year.
Late in the year.'
This was of course written in the aftermath of another death - Guevara's in October, 1967 - but can be used to apply more broadly to the ideals of the 1960s. Such beauty, poignancy and understanding of what could not quite come to pass. It is quite a corrective to the unthinking adoption of Guevara as consumerist 'icon' for today; this is not just about what Che meant then, but sums up the potential inherent in a new generation that was about to be forced back into line by the forces of reaction.
Project for future - seize the airwaves!
Idea for a TV series: a kaleidoscopic, disorientating mix of sketch comedy, political documentary, satire and ghost story. There could be parodies, cut-ups. An overall atmosphere to be evoked within the seemingly disparate elements. The potential for serial narrative segments across episodes, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End-style. Only occasional scenes with actors. Scope for capturing some footage on various excursions - stock footage to put to some use. Some of it to be filmed in the north, but avoiding the obvious.
Influences:
Adam Curtis shows / Steven Poole's wise tome on (ab)uses of our language, Unspeak / Jonathan Meades shows* / Sapphire and Steel / The Day Today / Brasseye / Cassetteboy / Absolutely / A Bit of Fry and Laurie / Monty Python / Patrick Keiller - London/Robinson in Space / Marker's 'La Jetee' (use of still images in storytelling).
Really need to watch Ways of Seeing...
This idea could even be realised for YouTube 'broadcast', conceivably, in fragments, or even a pilot episode. A long-term project, and one which needs a name... Planning can really begin earnest in a week or so's time.
* A major new discovery for me, the work of this man.
Influences:
Adam Curtis shows / Steven Poole's wise tome on (ab)uses of our language, Unspeak / Jonathan Meades shows* / Sapphire and Steel / The Day Today / Brasseye / Cassetteboy / Absolutely / A Bit of Fry and Laurie / Monty Python / Patrick Keiller - London/Robinson in Space / Marker's 'La Jetee' (use of still images in storytelling).
Really need to watch Ways of Seeing...
This idea could even be realised for YouTube 'broadcast', conceivably, in fragments, or even a pilot episode. A long-term project, and one which needs a name... Planning can really begin earnest in a week or so's time.
* A major new discovery for me, the work of this man.
Monday, 7 September 2009
'hey, Jules and Jim, I wrote the hymn to ecstasy'
'I look around me, and I see
Folks leading more constructive lives than me'
Granted, it is no too-good-to-be-true reunion with Martin, Neil, Wendy and Thomas - but then it probably couldn't be. Noted is the tangible melancholy in Paddy's liner notes and his interview in Mojo magazine, projects and the prospect of realisation slipping away, while the number of songs composed continues to mount. The record company rejected the demos for this album in 1993, apparently partly due to religious themes in the lyrics; presumably they'd never listened to his lyrics before - indeed on a certain 1990 opus. 'Tis a vision of music as The Sublime, as God - hardly a hectoring advertisement for Christianity. Closer indeed to Smile:
'Children don't you cry because
he, he said "let there be music!"'
The synth organ chords that open 'Ride', sigh... and the staccato arpeggiated undertow. Just what is it that this critic doesn't get, dismissing music this moving and urgent? http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/view/125388/We-like-you-just-the-way-you-are-Billy-Joel
Rather, this second track becomes immense - the finest use of the harmonica I have heard in aeons - the europhile beat insistently hooking you in.
And then. 'I Love Music' - a jazzy cantering rhythm, playful, near-techno organ stabs, meting out the devout. Fairlit sounds dotting about, that old delay on his vocals 'hell - hell - hell'.
'She's richer than money and bigger than fame
and love is the reason I'm playing this game'
Like Wendy, Martin and indeed Neil Tennant, he has not left the north-east. It is about the music, not appealing to an audience - a shame, as devout Sproutists such as myself yearn for many more releases.
There is brilliant scansion - 'Who's my hero? The unnerving, unswerving, Irving Berlin' - and love expressed for diverse geniuses:
'I love music! Nile and 'Nard
Pierre Boulez, guru of the avant garde'
Such beauty. The synth-strings following this, and the raindroplets of piano. I won't elaborate much more for the moment on the rest, but 'Music is a Princess' is glorious and 'Earth: The Story So Far' expansive, intimately grand.
It forms a junction between Jordan: The Comeback and Andromeda Heights, appositely enough considering the music was written from autumn 1992, and I am bound to luxuriate in that. J:TC I have often claimed as my all-time favourite record - ever an inspiration and consolation on one particular occasion - and this is the finest Prefab Sprout or McAloon album since that one.
No release from McAloon is without merit; I Trawl the Megahertz is an engaging world's service symphony (appropriately promoted via a Mixing It interview), the acoustic Steve McQueen recordings of 2007 are at times breathtaking; Andromeda Heights contains, amid its rather halting, slow progress, some of his very finest songs ('Swans', 'Weightless', 'A Prisoner of the Past') - even the maligned Gunman has a few that cannot be denied.
Let's Change the World with Music does attain a grace and sublimity, as McAloon says was aimed for in the liner notes. Divine chord changes abound and the sound is prime Prefab Sprout, albeit without Dolby. It does indeed sound like the original 1992 recordings embellished a little, sensitively. People could talk about things being 'dated' and then I'll stifle a yawn, as the J:TC sound is immortal. Another taste of it is glorious after the somewhat more conventional sound palettes of the last two PS records; the material here, with wrenchingly heartfelt use of electronics, matches Todd Rundgren's Liars (especially 'Afterlife') and John Howard's The Dangerous Hours albums - two more formidable 'comeback' records made in this decade.
All is right with the world in the duration of listening to new Pet Shop Boys and Prefab Sprout albums like we've had this year!
Telling interview, overlapping with the Mojo one: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/paddy-mcaloon-the-return-of-prefab-sprouts-elusive-genius-1780696.html
Folks leading more constructive lives than me'
Granted, it is no too-good-to-be-true reunion with Martin, Neil, Wendy and Thomas - but then it probably couldn't be. Noted is the tangible melancholy in Paddy's liner notes and his interview in Mojo magazine, projects and the prospect of realisation slipping away, while the number of songs composed continues to mount. The record company rejected the demos for this album in 1993, apparently partly due to religious themes in the lyrics; presumably they'd never listened to his lyrics before - indeed on a certain 1990 opus. 'Tis a vision of music as The Sublime, as God - hardly a hectoring advertisement for Christianity. Closer indeed to Smile:
'Children don't you cry because
he, he said "let there be music!"'
The synth organ chords that open 'Ride', sigh... and the staccato arpeggiated undertow. Just what is it that this critic doesn't get, dismissing music this moving and urgent? http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/view/125388/We-like-you-just-the-way-you-are-Billy-Joel
Rather, this second track becomes immense - the finest use of the harmonica I have heard in aeons - the europhile beat insistently hooking you in.
And then. 'I Love Music' - a jazzy cantering rhythm, playful, near-techno organ stabs, meting out the devout. Fairlit sounds dotting about, that old delay on his vocals 'hell - hell - hell'.
'She's richer than money and bigger than fame
and love is the reason I'm playing this game'
Like Wendy, Martin and indeed Neil Tennant, he has not left the north-east. It is about the music, not appealing to an audience - a shame, as devout Sproutists such as myself yearn for many more releases.
There is brilliant scansion - 'Who's my hero? The unnerving, unswerving, Irving Berlin' - and love expressed for diverse geniuses:
'I love music! Nile and 'Nard
Pierre Boulez, guru of the avant garde'
Such beauty. The synth-strings following this, and the raindroplets of piano. I won't elaborate much more for the moment on the rest, but 'Music is a Princess' is glorious and 'Earth: The Story So Far' expansive, intimately grand.
It forms a junction between Jordan: The Comeback and Andromeda Heights, appositely enough considering the music was written from autumn 1992, and I am bound to luxuriate in that. J:TC I have often claimed as my all-time favourite record - ever an inspiration and consolation on one particular occasion - and this is the finest Prefab Sprout or McAloon album since that one.
No release from McAloon is without merit; I Trawl the Megahertz is an engaging world's service symphony (appropriately promoted via a Mixing It interview), the acoustic Steve McQueen recordings of 2007 are at times breathtaking; Andromeda Heights contains, amid its rather halting, slow progress, some of his very finest songs ('Swans', 'Weightless', 'A Prisoner of the Past') - even the maligned Gunman has a few that cannot be denied.
Let's Change the World with Music does attain a grace and sublimity, as McAloon says was aimed for in the liner notes. Divine chord changes abound and the sound is prime Prefab Sprout, albeit without Dolby. It does indeed sound like the original 1992 recordings embellished a little, sensitively. People could talk about things being 'dated' and then I'll stifle a yawn, as the J:TC sound is immortal. Another taste of it is glorious after the somewhat more conventional sound palettes of the last two PS records; the material here, with wrenchingly heartfelt use of electronics, matches Todd Rundgren's Liars (especially 'Afterlife') and John Howard's The Dangerous Hours albums - two more formidable 'comeback' records made in this decade.
All is right with the world in the duration of listening to new Pet Shop Boys and Prefab Sprout albums like we've had this year!
Telling interview, overlapping with the Mojo one: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/paddy-mcaloon-the-return-of-prefab-sprouts-elusive-genius-1780696.html
Saturday, 5 September 2009
Films #1 & 2: Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (1968) / The London Nobody Knows (1967)
'Keep off
Mind how you go - oh oh
Don't you know the green grass is not for you
Oh no!
And all the flowers ain't for picking
They're just for standing in line'
(Episode Six, 'Gentlemen of the Park', 1968)
'YEAH – 1892 – lines are still on you – Hilly Fields'
(Nick Nicely, 'Hilly Fields (1892)', 1982)
An irregular series begins with a consideration of a pair of films recently issued on DVD for the first time, which form an eerie prelude to the sort of London psychogeography of Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller. I first read about the Cohen film, based on Geoffrey S. Fletcher's book, in Bracewell's England is Mine; I first caught glimpses of it during a 'workshop' computer session for my DTLLS teacher-training course late last year, when a fellow student, ex-Londoner and Art Lecturer watched a clip on You Tube of the Bedford Theatre part (now taken down), and told me how great a film it was.
The thing that strikes you about Cohen's semi-documentary is its sheer distance from the cliches of 1960s London, repeated to obsolescence by the media and associated heritage mongers: as here in the brainless shorthand given by the female presenter here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gg0kC1jNsQ&feature=related (yawn yawn YAWN)
Its companion film on the DVD release, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (dir. Douglas Hickox, 1968), complements it well; it is a love-poem to Hampstead, presenting a delirious vision of the experiences of those more fortunate in society, those without financial hardship and in love. Even then, there is the sublimely queasy sequence backed by the song 'Gentlemen of the Park' by Episode Six (a forerunner of Deep Purple apparently). Supported by weightless, shimmering Beach Boys bass and harmonies, the singer infers about streamlining and conformity in ominous tones - inferences all the more chilling for how beautifully they are rendered.
The 'men in blue' in the lyric seem to be the authoritarian forces of public order; in the film, they are photographers gathered on Belsize Park - ambiguous, ambivalent, disturbingly impersonal. Packaging and trapping the miraculously gorgeous Judy Huxtable in a way vaguely analogous to Paul Jones in the similarly woozy, but infinitely bleaker Privilege (dir. Peter Watkins, 1968). The sharp editing cuts from her in various costumes, poses and hairdos, refracted infinitely, dizzying, untouchable - Anthony May uncertain, tremulous, on his bike in a quest to find her. The Episode Six song should be highlighted as it is magnificent, up there with the great things being done by the Pink Floyd, the Beatles and Mark Wirtz around this time. The idealised nature of this particular London reminds me of Van Der Graaf Generator's 'Refugees' (1970), wherein Peter Hammill laments the end of his flatsharing in 1968/9 in the West of London with Mike McLean and Susan Penhaligon - an actress who incidentally was in similar types of films to Huxtable:
'West is Mike and Susie,
West is where I love'
Les Bicyclettes de Belsize is one of the more European visions of an English city I have seen; it forms something of a bridge between Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Saint Etienne's Euro-inflected urban aesthetic. The effect is as if filtered through the wildest dreams of a Margo Guryan protagonist and the blurred gauze of her Take a Picture LP of 1968: http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/margo_guryan/take_a_picture/
The London Nobody Knows forms the bleaker flipside to the bohemian languor of Belsize, showing the grisly Victoriana and war damage that lingered so long. It is an eccentric film, helped immeasurably by James Mason's role as a patrician guide and compere, complete with cap and wielding cane; his occasional interactions with Londoners are bizarrely amusing, and gradually take on a tragic aspect when he mingles with people boarding at a Salvation Army Hostel. These halfway houses to nowhere actually form a modicum of stability and luxury compared with the lives of those who, as Mason says, "can't and won't communicate with their fellow men":
Things reach a rather eerie, harrowing climax when Mason visits the crumbling 29 Hanbury Street in Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets - a Jack the Ripper murder scene - remarking that several residents of the street are old enough to recall those events. The film establishes the reasons that people tend to forget were behind the building of modern social housing: that many of the previous houses were horrific places to live, no more than slums breeding criminality and destitution. Along with Housing Problems (dir. Edgar Anstey & Arthur Elton, 1935), it is the finest indictment I have seen of the Victorian class and housing systems.
Mason addresses the likely passing of the Bedford Theatre in rather more melancholy terms, as befits a film actor of his theatrical style, yet there is no sentimentality. The theatre is an eerie, dead place; he makes sure we are under no illusions that the people have no use for it anymore. The music-hall entertainment - as detailed in its absolute twilight by John Osborne with The Entertainer - was no longer what people wanted; the theatre could not sustain itself. It had long been a tamed beast, anyway, after the royal patronage it received in 1912 (see my more detailed thoughts on music-hall at my old home, here: http://tom-may.livejournal.com/2004/10/15/). Better to demolish it and build something new than for it to undergo the undignified adaptation for the spurious purposes of 'regeneration', one might argue. An old Marie Lloyd song - with ghostly reverb applied - is played over details of crumbling decoration in close-up and the utter desolation of the entirety in panorama.
Another very old music-hall song is used in the graveyard scene, conveying a bleak gallows humour about death that reminds me of Steptoe and Son - the singer sings about what it is like to be 'blooming well dead!' Whilst music-hall may have been tamed and entombed even, working-class spirit still existed in 1967 - as shown in the remarkable market scenes that Mason mingles within. One has to take both parts of the picture; the vibrancy and the bleakness; today we see vibrancy in our cities generally replaced by blandness and corporate smugness and the bleakness is merely masked, disguised: moved to the outskirts.
Some would roll things back to the Victorian era, by way of the worst excesses of the last 30 years, represented here in unfettered selfishness and sod-the-environment-and-anyone-else consumerism: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/27/tory-borough-barnet-budget-airline
These people must be opposed at every turn, as they are against the limited advances that this country has made. Who do we reckon is likely to suffer from the cutbacks that will ensue if Cameron pursues this on a larger scale? I think we know it won't be hard-done-by Kensington or Beaconsfield 'taxpayers', but those who rely on local authority services. Libraries will be shut, jobs lost, support will not be provided where there is a need. It increasingly seems to me that Hannon, Johnson and these Barnet Tories represent the true face of the party straining at the leash to get going; the Thatcherite attack-dog has always been dominant - there simply aren't many, if any, 'decent' Macmillan / Heath consensus Tories left. Cameron is likely to go along with all this, but simply try and sell it with the typical Carlton Man duplicity.
The London Nobody Knows shows things at a very much more promising moment, at least for the young. In line with Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism tract, Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern's contemporaneous album Pram Town*, recent TV documentaries on Park Hill, the new tower blocks are put in context: as necessary to replace what was for most a miserable existence. It was only bad local government and maintenance that necessarily condemned the utopian dream to its apparent failure.
Cohen's film has its moments of futurism; the haunting, Cyril Ornadel-meets-Basil Kirchin strings and brass gives way in this sequence to a startlingly Radiophonic composition - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LOCYTmyYl4&feature=related - indicating the accommodation of locality and futurism that marked this era.
These two late-1960s films are superb, and I strongly urge anyone with an interest at all in London, history, music-hall, modernist architecture, Victoriana, the sixties, James Mason, Judy Huxtable or Jack the Ripper, to buy the DVD - which you can get for an exceptionally generous fiver.
A meeting point is - not for the first time - the Star and Shadow Cinema in Ouseburn, which showed The London Nobody Knows in early 2008, in the same Saint Etienne-curated season as This is Tomorrow, which I went to see. It also played host to Hayman earlier this year -pictured here looking strangely like George Formby: http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/on/gig/99 - and I am now sad that I didn't go.
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
'Making terms with the establishment'
Fine post on Morley's recent BBC4 programme / experiment, which I have seen the first of. I was hoping to compare with Goldie's similar exercise but sadly missed recording the second of those:
http://theendagain.blogspot.com/2009/07/school-of-knocks.html
Much interesting stuff on Dan's blog of late, from Little Boots (this year's Hands is a good if not great debut album, very promising indeed - some rare Saint Etienne influence, all making good my call at the start of the year for this to be a year of synth) to Thomas Hardy...
I quite agree with him that there is a tantalising sense about the scene where he works 1:1 with the musician, interpreting his drone-based ideas. The brief, improvised piece that results is compelling, unknowable, capturing an essence of Fripp & Eno uncannily, considering the musician had never heard
Curious that Morley didn't probe the more avant-garde side of classical music; he has talked much before of Stravinsky, Debussy etc, as in the 1999 Art of Noise project / album / live your. Xenakis, Ligeti and the like share many coordinates with the Miles Davis / Eno type terrain he was looking for.
Need classical music necessarily be an elite, in opposition to pop? Pop has encompassed Ligeti (that staggering part of the longer version of 'Dr Mabuse' by Propaganda).
I suppose much depends on one's view of 'professionalism' in music terms. I tend to feel the outsider, the agitator, need not have mastery, but some of it at least enables one to break the rules and make something new with more effect. Collaboration - or collision - between more schooled, intuitive musicianship and the more ideas-driven conceptual use of influences, is something I myself am looking to take part in. I am clearly more the latter, but can get by relatively speaking on a few instruments and have just bought a Roland Juno-D synthesizer (which I carried all the way home from Newcastle to Suderland, insanely - though via aid of our metro service). Whilst not a great listener 'by ear' I certainly get the minor / major distinction, which Morley so surprisingly could not.
It was interesting in pt.1 watching Morley interact with the musicians; he did seem cowed, in awe of them, to a large degree. No longer acting as the agent provocateur he once would. An attempt to broaden his horizons, move beyond his journalism - which has had little of the old passion for some time (indeed his daughter, Maddy, wrote an excellent piece a few years ago that showed enthusiasm and made one want to go and listen to music: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/jun/17/features.musicmonthly18)
Making a pact in order to 'get on' is a key theme in James Mitchell's superior historical drama, When the Boat Comes In, which I have now completed watching: more on this series anon; it begs for comparisons with the similarly expansive Upstairs, Downstairs - a northern variant, that also seeks to portray lives across the whole of society, across multiple decades.
Jack Ford may often seem like an antithesis to Hardy, Lawrence or Alan Bennett or Dennis Potter, but the series tackles this theme subtly throughout, with Billy Seaton's leftist's progress, and the curious episode in the final series about a local boy 'made good', going to Oxbridge and something of an unfinished business in Jack Ford's increasingly empty existence. The fourth series seems to locate the tenor of Noel Coward's 'Twentieth Century Blues' - so powerfully rendered by Al Bowlly with Ray Noble - locates the ennui of the 1930s, all the more powerfully for locating the hitherto cocksure, swaggering Jack so relentlessly within its conflicts and miseries.
This last series represents a search for meaning, in its occasionally 'travelogue'-like* progress (Cornell, Day, Topping, Guinness Book of Classic British TV, 1993)... Ford seems to find it within his essential defeat. Again he takes sides, again ambivalently, but you realise his essential loyalties have stood firm. An existence of compromise with all sides, but a deeper loyalty to his own: his platoon in WW1 and to decent working people and trade unionists. Whilst he rues his lost fortune - caused by the Wall Street Crash - he comes to accept that there is no way back. He must now take sides, and is able to do so in his usual nuanced manner.
* Hints of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! of eight years previously?
http://theendagain.blogspot.com/2009/07/school-of-knocks.html
Much interesting stuff on Dan's blog of late, from Little Boots (this year's Hands is a good if not great debut album, very promising indeed - some rare Saint Etienne influence, all making good my call at the start of the year for this to be a year of synth) to Thomas Hardy...
I quite agree with him that there is a tantalising sense about the scene where he works 1:1 with the musician, interpreting his drone-based ideas. The brief, improvised piece that results is compelling, unknowable, capturing an essence of Fripp & Eno uncannily, considering the musician had never heard
Curious that Morley didn't probe the more avant-garde side of classical music; he has talked much before of Stravinsky, Debussy etc, as in the 1999 Art of Noise project / album / live your. Xenakis, Ligeti and the like share many coordinates with the Miles Davis / Eno type terrain he was looking for.
Need classical music necessarily be an elite, in opposition to pop? Pop has encompassed Ligeti (that staggering part of the longer version of 'Dr Mabuse' by Propaganda).
I suppose much depends on one's view of 'professionalism' in music terms. I tend to feel the outsider, the agitator, need not have mastery, but some of it at least enables one to break the rules and make something new with more effect. Collaboration - or collision - between more schooled, intuitive musicianship and the more ideas-driven conceptual use of influences, is something I myself am looking to take part in. I am clearly more the latter, but can get by relatively speaking on a few instruments and have just bought a Roland Juno-D synthesizer (which I carried all the way home from Newcastle to Suderland, insanely - though via aid of our metro service). Whilst not a great listener 'by ear' I certainly get the minor / major distinction, which Morley so surprisingly could not.
It was interesting in pt.1 watching Morley interact with the musicians; he did seem cowed, in awe of them, to a large degree. No longer acting as the agent provocateur he once would. An attempt to broaden his horizons, move beyond his journalism - which has had little of the old passion for some time (indeed his daughter, Maddy, wrote an excellent piece a few years ago that showed enthusiasm and made one want to go and listen to music: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/jun/17/features.musicmonthly18)
Making a pact in order to 'get on' is a key theme in James Mitchell's superior historical drama, When the Boat Comes In, which I have now completed watching: more on this series anon; it begs for comparisons with the similarly expansive Upstairs, Downstairs - a northern variant, that also seeks to portray lives across the whole of society, across multiple decades.
Jack Ford may often seem like an antithesis to Hardy, Lawrence or Alan Bennett or Dennis Potter, but the series tackles this theme subtly throughout, with Billy Seaton's leftist's progress, and the curious episode in the final series about a local boy 'made good', going to Oxbridge and something of an unfinished business in Jack Ford's increasingly empty existence. The fourth series seems to locate the tenor of Noel Coward's 'Twentieth Century Blues' - so powerfully rendered by Al Bowlly with Ray Noble - locates the ennui of the 1930s, all the more powerfully for locating the hitherto cocksure, swaggering Jack so relentlessly within its conflicts and miseries.
This last series represents a search for meaning, in its occasionally 'travelogue'-like* progress (Cornell, Day, Topping, Guinness Book of Classic British TV, 1993)... Ford seems to find it within his essential defeat. Again he takes sides, again ambivalently, but you realise his essential loyalties have stood firm. An existence of compromise with all sides, but a deeper loyalty to his own: his platoon in WW1 and to decent working people and trade unionists. Whilst he rues his lost fortune - caused by the Wall Street Crash - he comes to accept that there is no way back. He must now take sides, and is able to do so in his usual nuanced manner.
* Hints of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! of eight years previously?
Friday, 14 August 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/aug/30/football.sallybolton
Whilst I am aware many feelings are genuine, and ruefully realise that he represented that old spirit of football - now lost - the above article should form a corrective. Robson was sacked as Newcastle manager - down to short-sighted chairmanship, as well as impatience from the fans and conflicts with the new type of players.
A fair few giving their tributes were scarecely qualified to do so, considering the history.
Whilst I am aware many feelings are genuine, and ruefully realise that he represented that old spirit of football - now lost - the above article should form a corrective. Robson was sacked as Newcastle manager - down to short-sighted chairmanship, as well as impatience from the fans and conflicts with the new type of players.
A fair few giving their tributes were scarecely qualified to do so, considering the history.
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