Deconstructive Artwork

 

There were a bunch of other permutations - probably a tour poster. The cassette had a different wording, mentioning "cassette inlays" rather than record covers. When the compact disc was invented, they adapted the text again for that.

 And then there was this XTC Go 2 era rarity which Andy Miller posted not so long ago on a social medium

All the handiwork of Hipgnosis, adapting here quite smartly to the New Wave way of doing things, dropping their proggy sub-surreal tableaux thing.

Made me start to look out for other examples of this and so far this is what I've found. 

Then there was also the Fast Product angle. Here a disagreement about the artwork for Gang of Four's release is documented on the back cover, a gesture at transparency (Bob Last went with a different concept for the front cover).

Last and Fast also put out some non-music releases that were playing with the idea of the commodity, packages filled with clipped out magazine images, pieces of orange peel (soon to rot) and other consume detritus. One called The Quality of Life, the other SeXex.

The idea of "product" being forefronted in the name Fast Product - this here is a commodity that you've purchased - a reveling in the fetishisable husk in which music reached consumers - is something Bob Last copied from New Hormones and Buzzcocks.

The tabloid newspaper packaging of the debut PiL single also fits - as does the Vogue style glamour shots on the debut angle. 

Other exponents

Sudden Sway - Phil wrote a fascinating essay about Peterborough's finest some years ago. 

And I suppose the first to make a stab at this was The Who with The Who Sell Out

Subsequently lamely echoed by Sigue Sigue Sputnik with their attempt to have actual ads as opposed to pretend ones between songs on their album. 

Win - formerly The Fire Engines ( again associated with Bob Last, this time with his post-Fast label Pop Aural) - had a whole consume-us, we-are-shiny-baubles, fizzy-drinks to guzzle kind of thing going, which then became (as with Sigue) increasingly humiliated and desperate when no one wanted to buy their particular product.  But that was already there in the Fire Engines days too - "Get Up and Use Me", "New Things In Cartons". Pop as units of stimulation, "modern drugs", disposable buzzes. 

But there must be loads and loads more examples

There's a Brechtian term, isn't there? "Expose the device", I think.  

Bob Last was a theatre student and Brecht had a big revival in the 1970s.

The Who - it's from Warhol and Pop Art, presumably. 

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Some more recent things in this approximate zone

Imaginary soft drink / pop star from the PC Music 

And further back in time, The Pop Tarts - American Pet Shops Boys with Baudrillardian hyperconformism / simulation pop elements - named themselves after a sugary treat and talked a fine talk about starting their own line of spin off products - truffles, fragrances what have you (this long before pop stars and rappers routinely diversified and turned themselves into brands). The Tarts were caustic about the pseudo-alternative rock of their day, R.E.M., the illusory concept of authenticity et cetera 

Frank Owen (oh think what I could have achieved if I'd had his motormouth pushiness!) browbeat the editors of MM into putting the Pop Tarts on the front cover, with - I think - exactly zero releases to their name at that time. 

Not sure if they ever did any deconstructive artwork though, as I'm not sure they ever released a record. 

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Andrew Parker points out the Spiritualized packaging in the style of generic chemist's packet of tablets. Playing cleverly on the old Spacemen 3 idea of music-as-analgesic, "the perfect prescription" etc. 

Very clever - "may cause drowsiness"

Now I have this somewhere and I have a feeling I never even opened even, having exhausted my interest in the record with the cassette advance. Perhaps it's valuable? It's probably a bit bashed about in transit,  over the years, though.

Was the compact disc really sealed up in a foil sachet like an actual tablet? 

The credits styled as pharmaceutical style information, dosage instruction, warnings etc is very clever 

Ed mentions Flipper's play on the generic, off-brand product lines in supermarkets, which was then - he says - ripped off by PiL (if true, perhaps fair enough given Flipper's debts to PiL)

PiL have the XTC style variants for different formats

However they messed up here I think, since "album" is not a format per see but a type of work, defined by its composition (usually if not invariably multiple tracks) and duration. The cassette and compact disc versions are also albums. They should have called it LP or Long Playing Record or maybe Vinyl LP for total specificity. 

Did "Rise" come out as "Single"? 

Why yes it did!

And then even copied XTC with the label 

But what happened when the second single was released from the album? Was that also called Single? Or maybe Another Single. 

Nope they kept the font - and the sort of Sainsbury own brand style design - but they used the song title this time. 

I bought  the limited edition double-pack version, 2 seven-inches in a gatefold. I guess because "Rise" was included. Can't remember anything about "Home".

They missed a trick here - if they had done a couple of new tracks to round it out, they could have titled it EP or Extended Play.  Then again, per my comments above about "type of work" versus "format", maybe not. 

Phil mentions Scritti with the 'how to make your own record' information and recording costs on the sleeves. Does he seriously think that Scritti just slipped my mind?  Me, who has been described as a Scritti-stalker!

The Peel Sessions EP actually has the contract they signed with the BBC as the ground on which the demystification info is printed. 

On The Mekons Story, they have a friend of the band reading out snippets from their contract with Virgin in between songs... 

Desperate Bicycles fit in somewhere too.

songs to bring out your inner Saxondale

 

Not dissing Saxondale 

No indeed - I'd go so far as to say that I'd be suspicious of anyone (or anybloke let's say) (it's A Bloke Thing) who didn't identify just a teensy tiny bit with Saxondale...  recognise a glint of affinity  

It's a top tune, any road. 

I wonder what Aaron Copland made of it. I checked and he was still alive when this was a hit. 

Now this - Mussorgsky Moogified - doesn't sound nearly as good but the visuals are mad

"Groundbreaking cinematic techniques" said Richard Williams, the presenter of Old Grey Whistle Test when they played a clip (at 8.02)

But it's just the same howlround plastic-fantastique FX used on Top of the Pops whenever they had a glammy groop on. 

And a barrage of comic strip Pop Arty images in garish hues overlaid.

I don't know why they turn the FX off half way through - after that, who wants to look at Emerson Lake and Palmer au naturel? 

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What are the other Saxondale jams? 

"Jessica" by the Allman Brothers? 

 (Aka the Top Gear theme tune)

Noel wearing his Raincoats

 

my own personal Blow Up

So I was watching an ancient episode of Revolver, from 1978. 

Boomtown Rats closing the show with a buncha boppy hits, including "She's So Modern"

Modern girls getting down to the New Wave sounds

Hang on, who let this chap in?!

In his white collar shirt, his tie and mustard tank top!

 Looks twice the age of the kids around him - like Roy Kinnear, or a Tory backbencher.

Still, he seems really into it

Letting loose, caught up in the frenzy, eyes scrunched, feeling the music, 

Who was this mystery mustard man?

Here it is in videomotion

 

you Ladbroke Grovers turn me on

 

Now I thought this lot were one of those typical hairy Grove 'n' Gate freedom fighters in the vicinity of The Deviants and Edgar Broughton Band. Fuzz freakout. Kings of oblivion. 

But this here "War Girl" is gorgeous, lyrical and dreamy - the guitar-tone closer to I dunno Manuel Gottsching. Love that hovering slide in the back of the action, like a cloud canopy shot through with sunset.

It's a Twink song so maybe that's why it twinkles.   

This other Pink Fairies tune is quite dreamy too

Overall they're a lot mellower than I imagined

Taking bearings from Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold As Love maybe, or the ambient guitarscapes on Electric Ladyland. West Coast stuff too.  Spirit? 

Were they all on Mandrax at this point? 

See, this is what I imagined they were like - MC5-ish.  Rock 'n' roll guerillas. 

Although even there the guitar tone is quite reverb-spacy and delicate.

Or like this - a less outer-spacey UFO maybe. 

Bigging up their area

A Pink Fairies tune makes Single of the Week in Sounds, 1976.

Released on Stiff -  Old Wave / New Wave cusp equipoise. 

I was under the impression that this Fairy went fully punk, or at least, pub rock, with this 1977 single on Stiff. But no, it still sounds more 1968. 

It actually sounds a bit like the wimpier things Radio Birdman did. 

Conceptually linked B-side by Larry Wallis is a bit more pubby-rocky

The hair also looks like 1968. These guys all wanted to look like the lead fellow in MC5. See also Mick Farren, who backed the wrong Ann Arbour band.

68-in-77.

Farren gets with the punky program - giving the Lurkers a good run for their money, but still refusing to trim his barnet.

 

Rock critics without much of a voice, pt 48 (cf Lester Bangs efforts)

"We thought, "oh my God, if the whole of society could react in this different way, wouldn't it be lovely - fairyland, in fact'. It was kind of a rude awakening when we realised that fairlyland didn't exist" 

- Farren looks back to the utopian dreams of the late '60s. 

"There was this fairyland... Someone was trying to build a six-foot jelly... There was a new world brewing. " 

- Farren recalls electrifying happenings at the Roundhouse, 1967  

Farren kept his frizzed out hair until the very end. Still articulate too. 

Recurrent use of the word "fairyland" suggests tall tales told and once believed, that now have to be put away like childish things. 

Farren moved into science fiction, like many of the '60s utopianists (Hawkwind, Jefferson Starship). 

Fairy tales for older kids. 

This one, which I own but have not yet read, combines rock and s.f. 

Jacket blurb:

"In the wilderness of Britain little of civilization remains. Decadence and division have overtaken the huddled people of Festival. And faith in the texts of the old gods - Dhillon, Djeggar and Morrizen - is fading fast. Beyond the city walls the tribes are massing, united in evil intent. Hill savages fired by ritual superstition to pillage and slaughter. Satanic horse riders inspired by drugs to rape and defile. And crystal-crazed Iggy at the head of them all - a despot in search of territory. A territory like Festival."

another back jacket blurb

ALL ROADS LEAD TO FESTIVAL

In the Great Hall of the capital city called Festival, the magic ritual of Soundcheck prepares the ancient loudspeakers for tonight's Celebration. It is the distant future, when all that remains of the ancient ways is a collection of sacred black discs which contain the words and music of the great prophets who lived before the disaster: Dhillon, Djeggar, and Morrizen, the fabled lizard-king.

But in the hills and valleys surrounding Festival, a threat builds. An outlaw army, wasted by spirits and speeding on 'crystal,' works its way toward the dying city, raping and pillaging, gathering strength and weapons as it goes. In Festival, the population continues its preparations for the Celebration, unkowing, unsuspecting...

In his first novel, Mick Farren, a leading writer in the underground press, combines the color and excitement of the finest fantasy writing with his own keen vision of a time to come when the Counterculture of today ascends to a whacked-out, chemical-crazed pre-eminence."

Talking of fairy tales and then more adult-oriented tales, Farren was also involved in Nasty Tales, a comic strip for "adults only" (supposedly prosecuted for obscenity)

Farren's work at the New Musical Express includes these pieces said to have ignited punk. 

Julie Burchill's memoir I Knew I Was Right has cameos of the battered-but-beautiful Farren, claims that he initiated her in certain arcane practices

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