replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Clock DVA - a name one associates with industrial music.
Well, they were actually on Industrial Records, weren't they? Put out a cassette via them, White Souls in Black Suits.
Then Clock DVA were on Fetish, an imprint started by TG associate and ultra-fan Rod Pearce (he rereleased Second Annual Report and various other Gristle records).
On Fetish, DVA were label mates with 23 Skidoo.
DVA singer Adi Newton was into Burroughs and Gysin - cut up, dream machines.
So all told, archetypally industrial. None more industrial.
However, if you listen to their best-known tune, "4 Hours", from 1981....
... beneath the shrill wail of the horn and the doom-boom baritone (Adi bridging the gap between Ian Curtis and Andrew Eldritch), the song sounds like the Cars or The Undertones, something of that ilk
It's got that damped-strings (or is the term palm-muted?) rhythm guitar chug.
The breakdown couldn't be more archetypally New Wave.
The lyrics, though, have something to do with the four hours of dream sleep, lucid dreaming, etc - i.e. typical industrial-style esoteric research.
After Thirst, Clock DVA actually briefly went New Pop, signing to Polydor for the album Advantage - an episode that seemed to embarrass Newton later.
The outcome somewhere between Lexicon Of Love and Floodland
After that Newton went back to the industrial left-field with The Anti Group
.... and then from 2011 a reformulated Clock DVA.
They are still going strong - indeed they put out an album this year.
"He didn't have much of a voice either, he was all nose and tonsil, a poor man's Buddy Holly. What he did have, though was... a certain persistent oddity, a real individuality. His first number one, What Do You Want?, was one continuous hiccough, a dying fit, agonized and agonizing, the words contorted almost beyond recognition. He spewed up the word 'baby' as 'biybe', choking horribly on each vowel, and that was the major hook... it was catching; it made him. One word mispronounced and he had his whole career going for him"
- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom.
.
Arrangement by John Barry!
Adam Faith's singing style - seemingly composed out of multiple speech impediments - is the ancestor for both Steve Harley and D Double E.
"Natch, he flogged it hard, spluttering and expiring like a man inspired, and he did very nicely. In retrospect, his big hits - Poor Me, Someone Else's Baby, How About That? - stand up as the best, most inventive British records of that time, the only truly POP music we were producing then."
- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom.
"But the most important thing he did was to introduce the concept of Pop Singer as Thinker, now so popular in documentaries and the Sunday Papers"
- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom
Sitting in the hot seat - still warm from Carl Jung and Edith Sitwell - Adam Faith, interviewed by John Freeman for Face to Face, wowed parents across the land: what a thoughtful, well-spoken, courteous and candid young man. No hooligan he: reads books, listens to classical music.
John Harris, in this piece on the Return of Boys Wonder - gigging action at the 100 Club and a new compilation - advances the thesis that they were BritPop avant la lettre:
"All this might suggest a lost classic from the mid-1990s, and the gaudy wonders of Britpop. But 'Goodbye Jimmy Dean' was actually by Boys Wonder, a visionary band whose star rose and fell between 1986 and 1988. They were about eight years ahead of their time, and in retrospect, their chronically awkward fit with their era was probably always going to be their undoing. But while they lasted, they were great. In 1987, I saw them performing on the Channel 4 comedy show Saturday Live, swaggeringly delivering another three-minute manifesto titled 'Shine on Me' I was smitten, but given their large-scale blanking by the music press (and the fact that the world wide web had yet to be invented), I was left wondering what on earth had happened to them."
Harris singles out as personally epochal the very TV performance that more than any other got me thinking about ShitBrit - I'd be obsessively rewatching this clip, wondering how on earth such obvious bollocks got so far (contrary to Harris, they did get a lot of music paper support)
That Ben Elton intro really adds savor to the shite, don't it!
Farce returns as history
"Some of their original stage outfits feature in Outlaws, a new exhibition centred on “fashion renegades of 80s London” at the capital’s Fashion and Textile Museum. But the main event is a brilliant new Boys Wonder anthology titled Question Everything, most of which has never been heard before."
The motley composition of the band - singer Ben Addison "and his twin brother, Scott, were art-school alumni from south-east London, who cut their musical teeth as the drummer and bassist with a quartet called Brigandage (“the Sex Pistols with a female singer,” he says), in the vanguard of a short-lived genre known as Positive Punk.... guitarist Graham Jones, who was about to exit the wreckage of early 1980s pop sensations Haircut 100" - highlights a thing I am fascinated by: the opportunism of bands.
Sometimes the band sticks together and keeps it name but hops from style to style, across the unfolding of several pop eras.
Sometimes the band will rename itself over this same process of changing with the times, adjusting to nomenclative fashions .
And then sometimes the bands keep disintegrating but the players reappear in new agglomerations with discards from other bands that didn't make it. The player will have adjusted their look and their playing style to whatever is happening, in hopes that this will finally propel them to fame.
So many examples... I remember NME mocking Gary Tibbs in the early '80s with a slideshow of his changing looks in different bands - Vibrators, Roxy Music, Adam and the Ants (and subsequently several more).
I suppose that fits more the journeyman, working-musician archetype perhaps.
More telling is the makeovers done by prime movers who keep moving with the times. E.g.
BritShit Emeritus Gareth Sager - The Pop Group, Rip Rig and Panic, Head.
Or Bebop Deluxe / Red Noise / Bill Nelson in his synthpop phase.
Or Cafe Society / Tom Robinson Band / Sector 27 / Tom Robinson
Yet more proof here of the persistence and aesthetic flexibility of most musicians, with what came after the fizzle of Boys Wonder:
" By the mid-90s, the Addison twins had formed Corduroy, a quartet signed to the Acid Jazz label who retained a London-centric sense of place, but mixed it up with everything from 60s film soundtracks (their first two albums were largely instrumental) to Steely Dan."
Their image is very different too:
Yes the chap with the glasses and goatee - and the receding hairline - I believe that is the formerly big-eyebrowed frontchap of Boys Wonder.
The missing stink between James Taylor Quartet and the Propellerheads.
Looking good is fine, is a duty for bands, yes yes... but sometimes you wonder whether the BritShitters didn't overbalance their energy output towards clothes and hair rather than sound:
“Ben would be sitting over in the corner with a pad and paper and he’d be drawing outfits. Our girlfriends were going to fashion college, so some of them could create the items of clothing that Ben was drawing.... “We would sit down together and watch the Who do My Generation on [1960’s US TV staple] The Smothers Brothers show,” says Addison. “The [Pistols’] God Save the Queen video. Untold Bowie stuff. Roxy, especially with the shoulder pads and Brian Eno’s feathers. Tom Jones when he was at his most gyratable, as it were. And pre-fat Elvis.”
".... A visual breakthrough came with the Addisons’ bowl-contoured haircuts, which defied the 80s’ tyranny of quiffs. “A good friend of ours called Andrew McLaughlin was a rising star within Vidal Sassoon,” says Addison. “He turned up one night at the Greenwich theatre bar, which was one of our favourite hangouts, with this bleached, completely severe fringe, like Henry V. He looked like something out of black and white Doctor Who. I said, ‘Fucking hell, Andrew – that is the bomb. This is what we’re going to do.’” Ben combined his new barnet with eyebrows almost comically thickened with an eye-pencil, and instantly had his signature look."
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Last time the topic of ShitBrit came around, a correspondent asked me to talk candidly in subsequent posts (of which they weren't any, although I'd planned to) about the complicity of the music papers - specifically Melody Maker - in elevating all this shite, things like the New Wave of New Wave. Eyewitness accounts of editorial meetings etc. This is what I replied:
I don’t know if I remember much about the editorial meetings and how things got to be covered
Most of the ShitBrit, there was either genuine enthusiasm from a writer (failings of taste on the part of journos is as much a generative cause of ShitBrit as it is on the audience level).
Or the attitude was more ‘there’s a buzz about this band, we need to cover it’. So someone would be dispatched to do that. I’m not sure we had any actual Levellers fans, for instance, but they needed to be covered, was the thinking
In terms of scenes, Romo was definitely a manifesto looking for an actual movement of good bands, but it was a great manifesto – just a bit premature. If they’d done it around the time of electroclash they would have had a slightly more plausible set of candidates to do the rhetorical push around – if still not quite substance of the enduring kind.
It was certainly a lot better as a concept / rhetoric that the things NME was coming up with (Fraggle Rock, was that one?).
Kingmaker was given a big push by NME. As was Cud.
MM was not unguilty in covering this type o’shite but it was not our core. I have no idea what those groups sound like – post-Wonderstuff?
New Wave of New Wave – did we start that? Or NME? Can’t remember but yes unadulterated shite. Wasn’t there a band called Snuff? They were probably solid enough, if boring. But SMASH and These Animal Men – typical Brit all mouth no trouser bizniz.
Manics eventually worked up sufficient substance to pass muster, but lagged far behind their own rhetoric. The Manics seem to have been some kind of intellectual / militancy lifeline for people a generation below me, especially those living out in the sticks… the Manics interviews really were their great contribution, their art form (an extension of what Morrissey did, where it was a big part of his job – to be interviewed, to be a provocateur). With the total innovation of having Richie (and Nicky to lesser extent) as the specialized function of discourse – a division of labor, all the musical graft and stolid craftmanship in the singer and drummer, all the attitude (and book reading) in the other two.
I think we are secretly fond of all this BritShit - it has that nostalgia power now. I almost regret living outside the UK during the second half of the ‘90s, it would have sharpened the blade of my fury even keener, because one would inevitably end up watching Jools Holland every week for want of nothing to do....
Imagine my surprise on discovering that it is very largely composed out of a single 10cc song, "The Worst Band In the World".
I much prefer the Dilla reconstruction - because he took the most exciting elements of the original and dispensed with the clever-clever conceit that the original song is built around. The bits that he doesn't use are without exception the insufferable parts - the vocal harmony bollocks. What he keeps is the thrilling gimmickry and off-kilter playing. Dilla activates a latent violence in the record that is barely discernible because smothered in cleverness.
This got me thinking about what exactly 10cc were about - their raison d'etre - and what category they could be assigned to.
Art-pop doesn't sit quite right - they are too mercenary and gimmicky, and there's no real expressive element, the sense of tortured emotions or wayward perversity as there is with Bowie or Byrne or Billy Mackenzie or Bjork.
Rather than "art", the word "craft" seems the apposite one - crafted and crafty is the way they go about things.
Craft's for craft's sake.
What defines 10cc and their ilk is the absence of inner fire... there's an anti-Dionysian, non-primal approach to music at work here - a kind of sonic hobbyism. Tinkering in the studio.
So here is the first of several retroactively invented genres I will be positing and posting about:
Clever Dick Pop
As important as "clever" is the word "pop". Operators in this area are dead set on having hit singles. They love and revere the tradition of the 3-minute radio song.
(Prior to 10cc and even prior to Hotlegs, the boys had worked as a kind of anonymous hit factory, operating out of their own Strawberry Studios in Manchester and churning out bubblegum tunes at an incredible rate for American producer-writer team Kasenetz & Katz).
So Clever Dick Pop is not the same as Prog - there's no 10 minute tracks with multiple time-signature changes and segmented parts.... no side-long song-suites. Clever is not really trying to impress with musicianship or edify the mind. It aims to amuse. To tickle the ear.
The patron saint, the forefather, of Clever Dick Pop is Paul McCartney. Think of the complicated but always cloyingly catchy contraptions on side 2 of Abbey Road. Think of much, maybe most, of his solo career and Wings. "Silly Love Songs", "Let 'Em In", "Band on the Run", "Coming Up" (especially with the video)....
Still, McCartney did have, now and then, some real feelings to draw on.
10cc, with only a couple of exceptions, seem completely heartless.
The big exception would be "I'm Not In Love", which does makes you believe there's actual pained self-deception, dependency-denial, going on in there. That is the record where the incredible construction skills of the vocal layering are put in service to, melded with, something that approximates to "soul". It's a song that could be mentioned in the same breath as that other Apollonian ancestor alongside McCartney - Brian Wilson. Craft in service of religious feeling.
But as for the rest.... "Life Is A Minestrone," "The Wall Street Shuffle", "Rubber Bullets". "Clockwork Creep", "Un Nuit A Paris".... Fuuuuuuck off.
(Just as boys reach sexual awakening at different times, so too with musical awakening... a friend of mine got into Pop Music before I did... I remember him one day insisting we listen to The Original Soundtrack in his room, with the curtains closed - a lovely summer's day it was too: how I'd rather have been up the woods or running through the bracken on the Common. I sat there politely bemused as he enthused about the sound effects and stereophonic jiggery-pokery)
Out of the foursome, Godley and Creme are the real Clever Dickheads... the other two, Gouldman & Stewart, who persisted as 10cc after G&C clever-buggered off (see appendix at the end), they seem to be a bit more in touch with the feelings side of pop (it was they who wrote "I'm Not In Love"... and back in the '60s Gouldman wrote stuff for the Yardbirds like "For Your Love"). But then the post-G&C 10cc did do "Dreadlock Holiday", which might I suppose be based in real feeling (racial paranoia) but is certainly clever-dickery of a high order (if also a decent slice of cod reggae).
Who else belongs in this clever-clogged genre?
Buggles. (Trevor Horn was a big fan of 10cc. Later worked with one of them in a reconstituted Art of Noise. And in between carried on his clever-Bugglesry with Dollar - a thrillingly empty reveling in plasticated overproduction)
M, as in "Pop Muzik", "Moonlight and Muzak", etc.
Electric Light Orchestra, although people no doubt find some of their songs moving (I for one was deeply touched by "The Diary of Horace Wimp")
Roy Wood (Clever Dick Pop has a relationship with Pastiche and Parody, since this is a jejune pastime that the brainy adolescent with precocious genre knowledge loves to do.)
Queen have Clever Dick traits... Brian May has tendencies that resemble Godley & Creme (see later) e.g. using a guitar to painstakingly simulate the sounds of other instruments, horns, violins, what have you. A layered and lacquered sound. But Freddie's ham melodramas generally blast through the intricate constructions. Clever Dick is never camp, and Freddie is camp, is Theatre.
Outfits that possibly only I in the whole world remember existing:
Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, Clive Langer and the Boxes, Fischer-Z, City Boy.
Antipodean contingent: Skyhooks, Split Enz
Split Enz bridge the Old Wave and New Wave eras, and as we get into the New Wave era, a lot of Clever Dickery is going on within the new aesthetic's strictures - the idea that you can write about other things than love - buildings and food and bureaucracy and organisations and transport - lends itself to cleverness of all sorts. Also smug social comment.
So we could include:
XTC with their tunes about being a helicopter and roads girdling the globe and Generals and Majors
Thomas Dolby (his image is bespectacled egghead scientist)
Squeeze perhaps although Glenn Tilbrook's sweet plaintiveness feels heartfelt even when the words are overwritten and the arrangements a bit too fussy. "Cool For Cats" is perfect Clever Dick material although you sense there's some kind of roughed-up-by-life feeling lurking within.
Are there any Americans in this Clever Dick genre?
Todd Rundgren certainly has the overproduction and over-arrangement, the excessive studio craft, the increasingly goofy subject matter and then later the Godley & Creme-esque interest in cutting edge video techniques (and didn't he also get into CD-ROM?!). But equally there's probably some emotion and spiritual yearning in there.
Sparks would seem to fit ("best British band to ever come from America") but actually there is among the conceits and whimsy, a fair amount of personal anguish (Morrissey in Autobiography wrote that Ron Mael's sex songs are like prison cell scrawlings). "Amateur Hour" is awfully clever but the subject, sexual inexperience and bed humiliations, is raw beneath the conceit.
I am thinking there must be a fair amount of European stuff that qualifies.
Clever Dick Pop - where every song is an aspiring novelty hit?
( I've just remembered another ancestor besides Paul McCartney - Jonathan King)
(There's also The Turtles, who did a whole album in which each song spoofed a different genre, complete with different imaginary band names)
So who are the descendants, the later exponents, the people who carried on the Clever Dick tradition? Oddly most of the names I'm thinking of are American.
College rock has its quotient - Game Theory. Let's Active.
Ween?
They Might Be Giants?
MGMT?
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Appendix: An Ancient Post on What Godley & Creme Did Next
On the subject of alternative history for music, one blogpost I never got around to writing up was trying to imagine a world in which Godley & Crème’s 1977 album Consequences was as massive as the record company thought it was going to be.
Consequences was this concept album the duo did immediately after leaving 10c.c. at the zenith of that group's success ("I'm Not In Love" etc).
A triple LP, in a deluxe box (like a classical box for a Wagner opera or something), with a 20 page booklet and four full-colour illustrations outlining the Concept.
It was made using the Gizmo, or Gizmotron to give it its full name: this sort of reinvented guitar they’d developed to simulate orchestral textures.
Consequences was a huge production, blurring the lines between pop, radio play, and comedy (Peter Cook was involved).
Now this is what interested me: the record company, Mercury, actually priced it even higher than a triple LP needed to be. They thought it would sell as this quality, high-cultural thing, a prestige purchase. They were thinking, I guess in the wake of Mike Oldfield and so forth, that this was the direction music was going.
But it took so long to make--18 months--that by the time it came out in the autumn of 1977, punk was all the rage. The album was a total bust.
That got me thinking about what circumstances would have had to prevail for Consequences to be a Tubular Bells level smash. I concluded that punk would either have had to not happen at all, or happen earlier, in a smaller way, such that it was all over by 1977. It was just bad timing for Godley and Crème, their record came out at the worst possible moment. The Wall was massive a few years later, as was Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds (similar in many ways – double elpee, lavish booklet, use of actors and spoken word, beautifully detailed and spacious production with lots of stereophony and alien electronic sounds – a movie on wax, basically, with a cast of dozens).
My thinking was that there was a structural necessity in the music scene (and record industry) for something like punk to happen - the erosion of that whole level of small-club music that created intimacy and community between fans and audience; the need for something that reflected teenage lives and frustrations, working-class real life; the gap for an aggressive hard rock with hooks and easy-entry levels of musicianship etc etc. But what if all that came about earlier? Say, in 1974, and had happened with less fall-out in terms of political resonances and repercussions.
A premature punk, lacking the ideological content that span off into the massive renewals of postpunk, DIY, anarchopunk, etc. Such that it had all blown over by '77.
One scenario I came up with: what if The New York Dolls had happened, had lived up to the hype, established a huge popular audience rather than the cult following that largely consisted of rock critics and people like Morrissey and the brothers Sylvian and Jansen? What if "real kids" rallied to them?
How could that have happened? The only way I could see was if one of the original members whose role was, shall we say, "decorative" went missing early on in the band's existence, through misadventure of some kind. And the replacement turned out to be their Glen Matlock figure, a proper tunesmith and anthem-builder. Like say a future Ramone, maybe.
If McLaren found this Ramone-enhanced Dolls a little sooner, and perhaps even had the bright idea of steering them into the hands of a Chapman / Chinn...
Leading to a wave of Dolls-copyists across the UK, managing to vent pent-up aggression / frustration effectively but non-consequentially (in comparison with punk), and taking a lot of the actors and prime movers of 76/77 out of the equation early.... Causing Mick Jones to form a Dolls/Mott type band, something as poppy and insignificant as Generation X, and Strummer to molder on in the Grove squatland, becoming a Tymon Dogg-like figure, a raspy busker.
But the innate self-destructiveness of the Dolls would probably have won through anyway... meaning that the moment would pass quickly...
Going back to Consequences (and another problem with my counterfactual is the, er, limitations of the material itself in terms of its mass appeal), I love this story about some of the studio shenagians G&C and their engineer got up to:
"Three days were spent producing a saxophone sound from an electric guitar; each note of a guitar solo was recorded separately and faded in on the track, which was then sent through a speaker and out of a rubber hose with perforated cigarette paper at the end. Enough pressure was displaced by forcing the sound through the holes of the cigarette paper to give the rasp of a saxophone."
Wouldn't it have been much easier, and cheaper, simply to hire a saxophone player?
Of course there is a further level of the alternative rock history scenario which I never got around to thinking about - what would be the consequences of Consequences being consequential - actually selling and being popular? Would the Gizmo actually have become part of the standard arsenal of rock and pop groups going forward? One of the accusations leveled at the record at the time was that it was little more than a demonstration record for the new instrument, an advertisement.... G&C imagined they would be selling them by the thousands.
Creme and Godley write a memoir - in 1981.
A punter recommends:
It's hard to believe now but back in October 1981 'The Fun Starts Here' was banned by a significant number of book chains; W.H. Smiths, John Menzies and Hammick's were amongst the stores refusing to stock it. Your humble correspondent, finding it liber non grata in the small (minded) town he was living in, had to hop on a train to Reading to obtain it. What was it about this book that sorely offended stockists? The answer, my friend, was flowing from the pen. Godley & Creme's illustrated story of British rock'n'roll circa 1957-1980 is, to misquote Nigel Tufnel, "One lewder": It's a scabrous, satirical, merciless laying-bare of the madness and ecstasy, the hypocrisy and egomania, of Da Biz. No turn is unstoned - not even the authors.
Their unforgettable images - a trouserless manager on all fours securing the 'best deal for his client', a teddy boy teen-dreamer strumming willy guitar in his bedroom mirror, a marijuana-mashed groupie having her knackered knockers autographed by the likes of Jimi, Macca, G & C themselves and 'Eric' who exhorts her to 'Keep on suckin'', a satin tour-jacketed, stack-heeled, perm-haired, middle-aged rock star in his mansion's mirrored toilet defecating gold discs into the bowl ("Success Hasn't Changed Me At All") - make the political cartoons of Gerald Scarfe, by comparison, as savage as a pastel watercolour of daffodils.
It's an uneven book - a couple of the stories are self-indulgently long-winded, shaggy-dog pointless, or not particularly funny - but genius was never a guarantor of quality control and these minor, infrequent lapses do not overly detract from the overall mesmerising brilliance of invention, inspiration and artistic execution. Although art schools were the breeding ground for the most imaginative of British rock musicians - Townshend, Ferry, Eno, Lennon, Mercury, Ray Davies, Keith Richards, McLaren, Uncle Syd Barrett and all - Lol and Kev were rare in applying their visual skills in their musical careers and to such a unique and devastating effect.
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All their subsequent solo albums are Clever Dick in excelsis - and the promo for "Cry" is state-of-art video-clever-dickery
The song itself seems to be an attempt to say to Stewart & Gouldman, "look, we can do our own 'I'm Not In Love'.... yet it feels very much like a hollow vessel.... it's hard to imagine anyone in the world actually being brought to tears by this song
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Okay I did quite like this one at the time
Today it strikes the ear as a bit like a sickly souffle, a creme caramel (pun unintended, LOL)
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 XTCGo 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 squad
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 The Pop Tarts 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 it, 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.
The compact disc sealed up in a foil sachet like an actual tablet - love it.
The credits styled as pharmaceutical style information, active ingredients, dosage instruction, side effects, 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.
Wouldn’t calling a release different things - Album, Cassette, Compact Disc - screw up your chart shop returns and chart position?
Did "Rise" come out as "Single"?
Why yes it did!
And they 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 (above) actually has the contract they signed with the BBC as the ground on which the demystification info is printed. And for utter transparency there is also a written account, on the left, of how the process went down with the Peel show (within the limits imposed by the BBC, which didn't allow them to discuss the negotiations). This is juxtaposed (on the right) with the ir own production costs for the vinyl EP.
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.
Andrew Parker mentioned these Pop Art we-are-product style covers
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)
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