look back in Hunger

the sound design in The Hunger is really rather fabulous

(in fact the whole look and sound  of the film of it is quite something - an extension of Tony Scott's brother's Blade Runner in many ways)

But the sound design - the electronic sounds  - were done by a musician and composer called Dave Lawson - who is credited on the movie for "additional scoring / effects"

Sadly none of them appear to be on the official soundtrack which is mostly classical pieces



nice synthoid dissonances if you wait through the warbly opera bit

geneva unconvention (the return)

women of pop

the rhythm method

two songs that could be put into conversation with each other

topics for heated discussion including

- racial longing

-  cosmologies of rhythm / politics of rhythm (vitalist rhythm versus annihilating rhythm, freeing rhythm versus fascist rhythm)

-  cultural feminism/second-wave feminism versus postfeminism / cyborg feminism

- faux-Jamaican versus real-Jamaican


... and probably a bunch of other things


i am feeling too hungover to attempt such a colloquy today


a third voice in the conversation could be




and a fourth




i'm minded also of Green's pipe dream of getting Kraftwerk and Gregory Isaacs to collaborate (the original version of 'Slave To the Rhythm' was "Germanic" and then it was rethought and go-go-ized)

and the mooted but never allowed to happen collaboration between A Certain Ratio and Grace Jones on a cover of Talking Heads's "Houses In Motion" and possibly a whole album, to be recorded at Compass Point

also the fact that it was Island who thought go go might be the next reggae for them (they'd already tried and failed with Afropop and King Sunny Ade) and went so far as to funded a movie about the DC scene with Troublefunk involved called Good To Go - that initially was directed by Don Letts, until he was fired by Chris Blackwell

actually interviewed Troublefunk around that time.... was not convinced by go go and the expectations around it bubbling in London style bible / soulboy circles


^^^^^^^^^^

burning with anxiety

why aren't they more legendary?

among the heaviest of the UK punks

"in a rut" the next step on from "submission"

hard rock with big, rolling bass





i suppose it is only those two songs that are titanic-ly great though really

this other hit of their is more than solid



'Staring AT the Rude Boys' is alright - accused by some in the music press of fomenting violence




the guys in the Ruts were kinda hippies - met at Deeply Vale Music Festival ! - realised which way the wind was blowing and changed their approach and no doubt hair styles and trousers.

then there's the whole reggae thing - the alliance with Misty in Roots



a bit like a politically conscious Sublime that one

same deadly drug takes out the lead singer


the last single (of the Malcolm Owen line-up) - getting a bit mainstream hard rock here





Stiff Little Fingers are another band lost to time as well, aren't they? they were so huge for about a year - remember a boy at my school had their logo all over his folders and briefcase

But no young person today would check them out, when going through the checklist of History You Must Acquaint Yourself With

whereas Buzzcocks, Wire, Slits, Clash, X Ray Spex would be most definitely be on that list...

geordie scene

pub rock versus pub rock

it's like the difference between Watney's Red Barrel and Double Diamond




11/26 bonus beers

post-postpunk

via

[Musicophilia - Post-Post-Punk] - The Dawning (1981-1989) by Musicophilia on Mixcloud

mix by Ian Mcnire aka Musicophilia

blurb:

"The spiritual successor to the '1981 - Heart' post-punk mix, 'The Dawning' traces the most emotionally evocative aspects of post-punk and new wave as they grew into some of the the most sophisticated adult-oriented pop music of the mid and late 1980s. Dry, angular guitars, funk bass and fuzzy analogue synths transform into carefully treated spare piano, jazz-inspired fretless and upright bass, and solid-state synths, samplers and sequencers, often married with strings, brass and woodwinds. The canvas may be larger, the screen wider, but the emotional heft is, if anything, enhanced by the relative polish employed by artists entering full artistic maturation, unafraid of beauty. A soundtrack of autumn becoming winter, equal parts city lights and sunrise.

For fans of CFCF, The Knife, St. Vincent, Bjork, Antony & The Johnsons, Caribou, Stina Nordenstam, Peaking Lights, etc. Check http://musicophilia.wordpress.com for more information, downloads, and other Musicophilia mixes."

"Morale" written and produced by British Electric Foundation + Glenn Gregory

love trap

signs of the seventies

cosmic cruise

love you big dummies

Höller back

York  Höller - an electronic and electro-acoustic composer who doesn't get mentioned very often - despite having studied with Stockhausen at the Electronic Music Studio of WDR .... then  in the mid-1970s composing at the IRCAM... and later on succeeding Stockhausen as artistic director of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music from 1990 to 1999

gas

concrete poetry

Concrete poetry (excerpt) from I•HATE•THIS•FILM on Vimeo.


(via I Hate This Film)

iranian belgian alliance

droog adicts

you've got to be taking the pif

Bad Music Era 84-85-86 (slight return)

lost futures #1 (Japan)

life is a cabaret

the best of british energy

Seventiesness pt 4

Seventiesness pt 3

Seventiesness pt 2

"Harley’s great passion aside from performing is horse racing and he has owned a string of horses over the years.

Appropriately enough the thoroughbred that earned him the most was a three-year-old called Cockney Rebel.

And it wasn’t even one of his.

It belonged to a friend Phil Cunningham, a man who could boast authentic Cockney roots as he was born within the sound of Bow Bells.

Cunningham fancied his latest acquisition to win Newmarket Classic race the 2,000 Guineas in 2007.

Harley, who lives just a half-hour drive from the racecourse, would get up at the crack of dawn to watch Cockney Rebel’s morning gallops.

What he saw so inspired him that he began placing ante-post bets when the odds were as high as 50-1.

As Harley says: “You don’t need a lot of money to win a lot of money at that kind of rate.”

He proceeded to make a series of £200 each-way wagers with internet betting sites that stood to make him more than £6,000 apiece.

“The mistake I made was drinking wine in the evenings,” he laughs.

“I’d be thinking ‘that was a good gallop’ and I’d go on to put £200 into another firm somewhere.

"Because I was drinking I’d go to bed and forget which accounts I had opened!” 

Cockney Rebel raced home first and Harley spent the next few weeks unearthing online nest eggs: 

“They just kept adding up.

"It was a wonderful adventure.

"Virginia Woolf said, ‘All is experiment and adventure’.

"That’s how I live.”

Seventiesness

i'm against the sixties

please interstellar policeman

optical poet

An Optical Poem (1938) - Classic Short Film from Munich International School on Vimeo.

Bad Music Era 84-85-86-87 (slight return)

Melody Maker cover stars, believe it or not

hyperdelia

rock on, and on, and on, and on, and on....

"but the original is still the greatest"

Berko's finest

Berko band win Melody Maker 1974 National Rock Contest with their hard-riffing progressive sound!

Cedric Sharpley went on to hit the sticks for Tubeway Army and Gary Numan solo

Bad Music Era 84-85-86 part 203

The most boring of the boring?



They used to top critics polls, Los Lobos. Mystified me then, mystifies me now.




Close behind, boringness-wise.




Actually bought this group's live album - look, things were desperate in '85!







Groups often ruined (beyond even the dismal intent / outlook) by the Eighties production, drum sound









Some cultural context via real-time coverage - intro to Barney Hoskyns's May 85 piece in NME on Lone Justice

"Eight years on and it's official — we are no longer bored with the USA.

In fact, so bored are we with the remorseless turnover of homegrown piffle that the dearly-loathed land is almost the only thing to get steamed up about anymore. (I mean, tell me, am I really supposed to be excited by Working Week?)

True, certain esteemed cultural spokespersons [he means Biba Kopf, Don Watson - the New Flesh Sick Noise supporters]  deem all this new yankee trad-ism to be regressive in the extreme, a way of copping out of confrontation with present realities, and they have a point.

But then R.E.M. and the Long Ryders write better tunes than Sonic Youth, so it's hardly surprising that people are more eager to swallow their version of America.

Perhaps there is the danger of an overly romantic view of these bands — these Bangles and Blasters and Beat Farmers — as though they had consciously set out to wage sonic war on the FM giants. Or as though covering some obscure relic by a Seattle garage band of the '60s were some kind of revolutionary statement. Finding genuine innovators in a pack of psychedelic country punks is a tricky business, and one has to agree with the Village Voice reviewer who observed that Jason And The Scorchers, for all their "reckless country soul", probably just want to be the next Rolling Stones.

And yet the awakening of young Americans to their musical legacy, the legacy of blues and country and "punk rock", is throwing up some remarkable raw talent — voices, players, songwriters grabbing hole of a few scrawny roots and taking a stand. These are kids raised on Zep and Aerosmith, people who probably first heard the names George Jones and Gram Parsons in an Elvis Costello interview. (In turn their records may get a British release on F-Beat subsidiary Zippo and the circle will be complete.)

With a fine irony, it is Los Angeles, bastion of everything most vile and unspeakable in American rock, which has nurtured the successive schools of revival. From hardcore beach punk to Sunset Strip power pop, from synthesizer noowave to the Paisley Underground, and from Hollywood rockabilly to suburban cowpunk, the smogopolis has been through as many in-crowd scenes as London. For seven years its garage-bound peasants have been revolting against the Bel-Air rockocracy." 

In all honesty I would vastly rather listen to the sounds being made by the Bel-Air rockocracy in the mid-Eighties than this sorry lot of faux-shitkickers. 

Probably even back then, in 85-86, I'd have preferred the soft-rock lot  -  did buy, like so many others, "Boys of Summer" [and the Eagles were country-rock 15 years before LJustice et al] and I succumbed deliciously to Fleetwood Mac's Tango In the Night (and retroactively bought Mirage and the Stevie Nicks solo albums along with the Obvious Towering Masterworks Rumours and Tusk and self-titled).

The one band / song of all the roots-punk that really shook my tree - Blood On the Saddle, "Wish I Was A Single Girl Again"



Oh and I did like The Gun Club....

Melody Maker was even more gung-ho and totally on top of this (Original Wave of) New Americana action in 84-85 than NME  was - this is before me and Stubbs et al joined - and  the paper continued to give it time and space long into the Arsequake/Blissrock era with the likes of Green On Red, Thin White Rope, etc - thanks to editor in chief Allan Jones love of all things dust-blown and Wild Bunch-y.




TWR I recall had a certain majesty and/or  blasting power



Seem to recall quite liking a Giant Sand album or maybe it was a solo thing by Howe Gelb....

To me though Meat Puppets II and Up On The Sun dealt with this area so much more sublimely - kosmik shit-kicker

the white Grace Jones

also the European Ru-Paul

kipper kids

oxford street

ladies of the seventies

different version of 'another suitcase'

harry brown

has any other group got two songs about smack onto Top of the Pops?






what are the groups that have got even one song about smack onto Top of the Pops?


("don't bring harry" was their Xmas single of whatever year it was; cool then that they got onto the Xmas editon of TOTP with "golden brown")




always think i should give Meninblack another chance





maybe not

could swear they did "just like nothing on urrrrrghhth" on TOTP - no trace of it on youtube tho

in blissed out company

I was seven or eight when these events occurred!

Actually alive....

Often wondered,  if i'd been born ten or twelve years earlier, whether I'd have been a full-blown hippie....

Or too cool to fall for it

I think I would have fallen for it, fairly wholeheartedly

But maybe not stuck with it...   as long as 1971



Got a low tolerance for squalor

And I can't see me in one of those Glastonbury Fayre 71 percussive calvacades of hairies banging pots and tambourines in an endless jam-a-long


But who knows - given enough acid intake - where you'd have ended up...

dutch and danish

radical cabaret

Moody & the Menstruators from Anne Bean on Vimeo.

prog glam confusionuum #56

Todd Rushgren meets Split Enos

speaking of Geddy and co...





and the lead fellow went solo and sort of technoflash meets Noo Wave





the missing stink between Cheap Trick and... Primus?

artpop new wave artpunk continuum #456

(the lee 'n' nancy love is a consistency at least, and the love of a nice jacket)

prog glam new wave continuum part 7

sixties part 229301274

sun blind music

chillage

the (first) Bad Music Era - 1968-69-70

and that's just the Yanks

could do another dozen with the Brit end of things

these'll have to do for now

the Sixties part 294

Danceteria

African space

"serious moonlight" - a series (#1 of ___ )

there's a category of mid-to-late Eighties aspiring epic-ness

singers and songwriters who take on the plainspoken yet weighty language of parable, who deliberately embrace the-reason-it's-a-cliche-is-because-it's-true, to the point of risking corny

at the risk of squandering any credit earned from my Aussie pals from the Antipodean Space post


here's the first entry in this series




Nick Cave was a - perhaps the - pioneer of this drift towards "some call it corn"

The Triffids originally were quite heavily influenced by the likes of The Birthday Party (and The Gun Club too I suspect). And being in those days a BParty junkie craving more of the same, I remember being very excited by their John Peel session, bits of which were like a postpunk "Celebration of the Lizard". Even bought a live tape of one of their shows at a stall in Camden Market - quite possibly the only live bootleg I've ever bought. Sound quality was terrible!





Then they duly followed Cave's post-Party trajectory into Americana  - with a bit of Waterboys-style Big Music thrown in there

Remember being taken aback by - and not at all engaged by - the country-rockish mellowness of the albums that followed, Born Sandy Devotional and Calenture (title comes from "Tropical fever or delirium suffered by sailors after long periods away from land, who imagine the seas to be green fields and desire to leap into them"!)







Coming from the same sort of place as 10, 000 Maniacs

or even Lone Justice

That said

here's a good piece by  Anwen making a case for the specialness of the group in this phase

Antipodean space

seventies sugar

Geneva Unconvention

Someone should give her a real TV show -  an  American Mighty Boosh maybe

maypole music

when i was a yout i thought this song was the silliest of trifles



but now I think it's really cool  - especially in combo with the lavish video

on the radio here they play the 'extended version' which is more dance-dubby in the early 80s mode and much more crisp and detailed



Did Men Without Hats do anything else of note?







but going back to "The Safety Dance", it got me thinking about maypole songs

now would you believe (embarassing to admit, being a hauntologist and all) I only recently saw  the whole of The Wicker Man for the first time

two things astonished one about it

1/ it's pretty much a musical, isn't it? a horror musical



2/ I had assumed - having seen only the end bit in the past - that it was your standard plot of stranger gradually realising something is awry leading up to a horrific revelation at the end (and last minute rescue and/or twist).  But in fact (spoiler alert) you are shown right from the start - and Edward Woodward's visiting police sergeant sees right from the start - that Summerisle is a pagan community based around a cult of Nature and fertility - it's all upfront, from sexual shenagigans in the cemetery at night, to strange totem shaped confectionery in the sweetshop, to the teacher teaching the schoolgirls about phallic symbolism in their rites and revels ....  There is nothing to discover, nothing to unveil... and what's odd about the plot (apart from all the songs and dance routines interrupting - not the Hammer/Tigon norm) is that Edward Woodward plods along in full awareness that something utterly-aberrant is a-going on, seemingly determined to meet his fate.

And of course instead of the last-minute reprieve you're expecting, he's goes up in smoke along with The Wicker Man

Burundi Wow Wow (original junglists)

For about eighteen months, Bow Wow Wow were my favoritest band in the whole wide world





In my first year at college I had this ginormous poster for the See Jungle album that I'd somehow managed to peel off of a hoarding in London.... probably by ripping it starting from the layers of poster and glue well below the top layer....  Ragged and glue stained, it took over a whole wall of my room at Brasenose



I had all the band's stuff except for the first single for some reason (maybe my brother bought it) ....  "W.O.R.K.", Your Cassette Pet, "Prince of Darkness", the See Jungle album and the singles off it, and some other odd E.P. (I think) release that had "Mile High Club" on it ... even got the post-McLaren, Mike Chapman produced album....





I think the Chapman connection must have come about through the Blondiesque vybe of this song...



So keen I was on the whole vision thing around the band I even bought a Vivien Westwood World's End frock for my first girlfriend (she never wore it, and fair enough...  bloody expensive it was though for a student on a grant)

She and I saw them play live once in St Albans probably in between "W.O.R.K." and See Jungle



A year or two ago I saw them for a second time  - with my last girlfriend - as part of an Eighties nostalgia line-up at the Hollywood Bowl.... bottom of a bill that also featured Psychedelic Furs and was topped by The Go Go's, who were just great ...  Bow Wow Wow - well, it was sweet to see them...  but the drummer they had, in lieu of Dave Barbarossa, couldn't get the rolling and tumbling beat right at all... and the guitarist taking the twangy place of Matthew Ashman (RIP) was only moderately swashbuckling....



Actually they sound alright in this clip someone took on their phone, but in the audiotorium it didn't sound so hot.

Can't embed my absolute favorite song of theirs - "Hello Hello Daddy (I'll Sacrifice You")

This would be in the Top 5



Now this next one really ought be a convergence of my passions / universes so righteously designed-pour-MOI that my head explodes



Unfortunately it's ruddy awful...

Need to wipe that from my memory-screen ASAP

Now this, this is hauntological



I was really into Adam and the Ants too, but I'm not ready to show the photographs. Not yet.

Britpop Mk 1

original by George Formby








last one not too putrid - C86 in nineteen sixty six

bogan boogie

desert concrete

from 32-30 ish for a bit, and then again 47.40 onwards  -  radioscape soundsmearage (by Sidney Margo?)

also, Stockhausen 'Hymnen' over the credits!

ancient electronics

Satyricon (1969)
Directed by Federico Fellini
Music by Nino Rota
İlhan Mimaroğlu
Tod Dockstader
Andrew Rudin

concrete airplane

and serialist airplane

MORadelia

Keith West - Grocer Jack by Franc_6




















owfullscreen>

newley concrete

this was yesternever

appearing on this


(via toys and techniques)

Brat Girls

all of these good to great (except Baby Amphetashite, which, for shame, made the cover of NME - see below )

but all pale next to this

julie c + alice c

the cover




the original





another glitter rocker getting in touch with his feminine / feminist side

the original




the cover

old wave goes new wave

"St. Etienne"

Hard to think of music more offensive to the sensibility of Pete 'n' Bob 'n' Sarah than this



But Frank Z bagged the name first



Lord alone knows what the town (or, less likely, the team) signified to him...




Another hippie-dippie era connection I only just twigged (but one that was deliberately chosen by P & B & S)

the connection between this

and this

pastoral future

never mind the ballards

the Sham Pistols

In the straggly yet-another-single-off-the-album afterbirth of The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle's release, excitement briefly convulsed the abandoned flock of punk rock in the summer of 1979 when it was announced that Jimmy Pursey was to join the Sex Pistols as their new front man. 

This was big news, naturally, and I seem to remember it being the cover story of at least one music paper (probably Sounds) and prominently featured in the other ones too.

The Sham Pistols, as the outfit would be known but only retroactively, was more than Pursey-meets-Pistols. It was a chimera-style merger of half of Sham 69 ( singer + bassist Dave Treganna) with the rump of Sex Pistols - Steve Jones and Paul Cook, who in very short order would go it alone as The Professionals. 

For the merger would be short-lived. 

Aesthetic differences led to friction and then combustion, with the ex-Pistols walking out of a recording session.

I seem to remember reading in one of the reports that ensued, Jones commenting disparagingly about Pursey's lyrics, which were - I think - too East End working-class sentimental and British-y for Jones's liking.  He and Cook seemed particularly revulsed and derisive about a line about "dog tag generation" or words to that effect. Which I took to mean something to do with the Second World War, the Blitz, Vera Lynn, etc.

Jones sneered "it's worse than working with Rotten", while Pursey for his part retorted "it was absurd, the difference between us... I knew it could never work out".

Soon after Pursey reformed Sham, who had split earlier in '79; Jones & Cook formed The Professionals.

In Rotten's new biography he writes about Richard Branson's attempts to get him to reunite with Jones and Cook, playing them Professionals recordings, saying "isn't this great, Johnny? What do you think?"



Well, it's got the guitar sound... 

To round off the annals of post-Pistols iniquity, Cook and Jones also joined with another rock'n'roll bad boy, Phil Lynnott, to form the just-for-fun outfit The Greedy Basstards, who if memory serves had a smallish Xmas hit with this punked up seasonal spoof.