Saturday, October 13, 2012

"This album was created with absolutely no guitars"



that's written on the back of the first two Synergy records, 1975 and 1976, an inverse nod to Queen's "This album was created with absolutely no synthesizers"

c.f Human League - “We are the Human League, there are no guitars” (Phil Oakey, voiceover on “Dada Dada Duchamp Vortex’, which is 1977 I think) and also "We're the Human League.

There are no guitars or drums played on this record" on 'Dance Like A Star" which is also 1977 I believe. 

I don't think Queen though were anti synths, though,  so much as  trying to say "all these amazing sounds you're hearing on the record, that's our wizardry with guitars and the mixing desk"

they don't seem like Luddites

plus there was quite a lot of synth-ery in mainstream rock before Synthpop...  

Pete Townsend had a big collection of synths





 Pink Floyd "On the Run"...  Hillage...

or this 

 
or this 



there's loads more examples

sort of makes you wonder why Synthpop was such a big deal

i guess because it wasn't so player-ly, so obviously musical in the Old Wave sense...  and synthpop also had the mechanistic post-Moroder rhythm aspect...  it very much didn't rock, didn't groove

Friday, October 12, 2012




 Daisies, mashed up



who are these Messer Chups then?


"Horror Surf"? "Russkie Wig-Out! Surf / Electro / Exotica From Behind The Iron Curtain"







Someone told me there was this thing called "Ukrabilly", Ukrainian psychobilly, bands influenced by the Meteors and Guana Batz, wouldyabelieveit....




"film version of Ursula K. Le Guin's 1971 novel "The Lathe Of Heaven". New York City's public television station WNET produced this film in 1979 with the assistance of the author and originally broadcast  in 1980"
 
audio special effects by laurie spiegel, working out of TV Lab, WNET's experimental TV unit



from the YouTube blurb:

"before YouTube, before Reality Television, before the Internet, artists and filmmakers pushed the boundaries of television at the TV LAB. Video synthesizers, the digital time base corrector and a blue-screen ChromaKey studio made the TV LAB a place where artists could put their hands on the latest equipment to create what became the new global phenomena of video art. TV LAB supported documentary makers who used the new PortaPak video cameras andrecorders to revolutionize storytelling by going behind the scenes to capture spontaneous action that network television had ignored. TV LAB encouraged writers, directors, choreographers and animators to experiment and innovate." 


"Television can be better than television is", this educational, historical and inspirational documentary about the TV LAB at Thirteen/WNET (1972-1984) reminds us"

more info here

Wednesday, October 10, 2012




"Throbbing Gristle - Live At Oundle School 1980

Recorded live at Oundle School in Peterborough, England 16th March, 1980. Aside from two school staff, the audience consisted of school boys between the ages of 8 and 16."

[via Timhtube]

Always wanted to see this.... i seem to recall reading about in the news pages of a music paper at the time, maybe Sounds... or perhaps it was a few years laters when doing research for a Monitor piece in the Bodleian Library circa 1985 that was about postpunk/new pop and that entailed me getting them to pull up great clumps of old inkies from the stacks...  at any rate i'm sure i read about it long before  embarking on the research for Rip It Up... it really stuck in my memory as "what the fuck, how on earth did that ever happen?"... Oundle being a public school, i.e. a private school, with boarders and "day boys" and quite probably all the same stuff as at my school (tuck shops, 'fagging', corporal punishment, ink wells in your desk, the cadet corps, rugger, swimming baths with 'no trunks', horrible food....  the whole Molesworth/If...  drill, basically ... and in 1980 I would still have been at it

Tuesday, October 2, 2012





preemptors of punk, or the last dregs of shock rock?

The Tubes, a band whose very existence I'd forgotten!

 c.f. Musical Vomit, the theatrical shock rock band formed by future members of Human League and Heaven 17 at the youth drama / arts center in Sheffield (the Meatwhistle)

There was a South Bank Show them, I believe. The Tubes, not Musical Vomit.

This isn't it, I don't think.



Lampoon rock.



Didn't this number usually involve a gigantic cigarette onstage?



Monday, October 1, 2012



who knew, there are remixes out there of marshall hain, 'dancing in the city'




and they had other songs, you know


picked up in Tilburg -- Free Ride, their album (on Harvest)




kit hain had a solo career