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
fascinating BBC Archive dig up of a program made in 1963 looking back just a few weeks to the early wintry months of 1963 and the Great Freeze . The UK was brought repeatedly to a standstill, rivers froze over, even the sea froze up a bit in certain coastal places, people got trapped in remote villages and having to huddle in the school hall for shared warmth, helicopter rescues of people whose cars had been snowdrifted.... beautiful images of frozen waterfalls and brooks in mid-babble cryogenized crystalline
I was safe and warm in my mum’s tum for the duration (born June 19). I asked her about it and she said she did remember it being challenging getting to the shops sometimes but had forgotten about all the rescues and frozen rivers (people skated to work along canals, the roads being impassable, train tracks smothered… also skied and sledded through the streets)
I initially misheard the lines as "I'm a hot retard!" "Marquis de Sade!"
Like an iD fashion spread turned to music
Only in the UK could such flimsy nonsense prosper and become Successful Pop
But Haysi Fantayzee had two fun hit singles - this one and "John Wayne Is Big Leggy" (is that a penile innuendo?)
And there's something about the brazen McLaren-copyism that is likeable. Fake-folk. Nostalgy de boo. Hip-to-be-square-dancing.
The lisping feebleness of Kate Garner's voice is sort of endearing
They are better than Wide Boy Awake, at any rate.
A direct graft off Adam and the Ants, and thus off McLaren
In my Rip It Up researching, did I listen all the way through Battle Hymns for Children Singing? I don't think so.
Kate Is Big Leggy, if anybody is round here. Certainly worked those gams at every opportunity,
Whereas pint-sized Jeremy Healey is a sort of Bolan-esque goblin crossed with Dickensian urchin.
The Artschool Dodger.
Apparently he went as Jeremiah Healey at one point.
Wait, there's more - two less successful singles
First is imitative of Duck Rock's Soweto stylings
And this one is more in the "Buffalo Gals" vein - at least until the flaccid chorus
Healey went on to be one of the superstar deejays, jetting to gigs and earning inordinate fortunes for a few hours spinning, especially at New Year's Eve.
Before that though he was a selecta on the supercool warehouse scene of the Eighties - The Dirtbox, right?
The improbable existence of this book of scholarly essays on Deep Purple fer fuck's sake made me re-contemplate this band's deep uncompellingness.... how they run a distant third to Led Zep and Sabbath....
And then to wonder what other examples of this clustering and ranking could be found across music history...
The obvious one is Beatles and Stones with The Who trailing some distance in achievement / charisma
In baggy, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays out front... with The Charlatans far behind (and funnily enough their big hit "The Only One I Know" owes more than a little to DeePurp's "Hush")
(although the Inspiral Carpets could also be a contender for Distant Third)
Britpop is slightly different as there's a Top 3 - Oasis Blur Pulp - with Elastica trailing at fourth (but I prefer them to Oasis and Blur)
Does it work with IDM? Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and (for me at least) Autechre trailing in third.
For a true parallel with the Led Zep / Sabbath / Deep Purple relationship, there would need to be a sense of redundancy - that there is no function for the #3 band, since whatever it is they are bringing to the table, it's done better in one or others of its facets by the top two preeminent bands.
In other scenarios, the ranking is based less on this idea of overlap-induced redundancy and more about a level of quality and consummate achievement. e.g.
Manchester postpunk - The Fall and Joy Division, with A Certain Ratio coming in third (as a largely unrealised proposition, based on the recordings at least....
Postcard - Orange Juice and Josef K, with Aztec Camera far behind
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There must be "Deep Purples" of funk, of reggae...
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Of course fandom and taste being quirky, you can find yourself perversely more taken with or invested in the bands that are objectively much further down the rankings.... John's Children and The Eyes mean more to me than The Who ever will... Budgie, with just two songs ("Whisky River" and "Hot as Docker's Armpit"), have given me more pleasure than Deep Purple
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Rainbow - as once discussed here I vaguely recall - are a whole other order of inessentialness - no sense of a vacuum being filled, a need supplied
Very much a case of "if they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to invent them"
That said I vaguely recall someone here asserting value and interest for the first two Rainbow albums
And someone else piping up in favor of "Since You've Been Gone"
The origins of the metal magazine name? Barton-birthed in the headline for a Ritchie Blackmore cover story....
More onomatopoeia inside
What a right puddin' he looks
Rainbow were on the cover of Sounds an inordinate amount, so to vary it up, they had Cozy Powell on the cover once, instead of Blackmore
Few drummers can have drummed on more inessential records than Cozy P:
I used to have a Deep Purple box set (sent unsolicited by a big record company in those days of major label largesse). And one thing of mild interest gleaned from the sleeve note essay was that Deep Purple were a singles band, unlike Sabbath and Led Zep (who never released a single, right?). Consequently they had a large number of hit singles and appearances on Top of the Pops. And their stuff is quite catchy and also quite groovy - metal as dance music.
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It was the scholarly tome that made me think of the mysterious nullity of Deep Purple (one of those names that you saw scrawled on desks a lot, growing up in the 1970s.... and one of the names that first puzzled me as rock-innocent child... another was Bread... I used to be transfixed by the cover of a Bread album which was in one of those spinners full of LPs in an electrical goods shop on Berkhamsted high street... )
But something else swam into my ken recently that was Deep Purple related... one of the YouTube programs I've been slamming into my veins to keep me sedated through the last crazy weeks...
I don't know why it's Ritchie Blackmore Presenting this on his YouTube channel - since he's not in it, it's Jon Lord repping for DeepPurp.... but what a pleasant laidback sort of conversation on some long ago cable TV rock chatshow .... love the mustachioed ultra-chill presenter... Speakeasy, wot a title!
Ritchie Blackmore is considered one of the Great Guitarists, isn't he? He's included in this book Big Noises by the late Geoff Nicholson, a very entertaining collection of short essays on loud, flashy guitarists
I just can't hear it.
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As mentioned in the comments, Deep Purple have a higher stature in Japan
Fascinated by this particular performance of a song that was among the select group of pre-punk songs to cut through to me, a child then not paying that much attention to the hit parade beyond a weekly watch of Top of the Pops.
"Wide Eyed and Legless" is a harrowing confession of inadequacy and failure - "this world is full of my shame" - from a man beaten by the bottle ("the rhythm of the glass is stronger than the rhythm of life") and who sees no prospect of ever getting "free of these chains". He's been here before, so many times, and remains locked in a cycle of sorrow that cannot be drowned.
And here's the singer grinning through the performance, laughing and larking about, and the band too all smiley affability - while an audience of children (the show isSupersonic) bob balloons about and treat Fairweather-Low and crew as if they're a boy-band like Slik or Flintlock.
Incongruous!
Musically, it's true, the laidback, easy-going sound is at odds with the lyric - it sounds more lighthearted than the subject matter..
That Old Wave musicianship also feels equally at odds with Supersonic. It's like if John Martyn popped up in the teatime slot for kids programs
Packed with pre-punk pleasures: the smokey yet somehow also icy electric piano (on the record it's played by Rabbit aka John Bundrick.... here it is Georgie Fame)... the pedal steel from B.J. Cole.... Maudlin countrypolitan strings add sweetness that only brings out the sourness more sharply.... and a great aching edge-of-strained vocal from Andy Fairweather-Low.
For sure, pop history has had its fair share of "heavy" hit singles, dealing with death and other grim stuff...
(I mean, "Copacabana" is tragedy.... "D.IV.O.R.C.E." is gritted-teeth behind the jokey framing... Country specifically is full of this kind of thing: "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)", "He Stopped Loving Her Today"... I once tried to persuade a girlfriend that "Hello Walls" was as harrowing as Joy Division).
But "Wide Eyed and Legless" - it's like The Lost Weekend or Leaving Las Vegas fed through Billy Sherrill...
"Wide Eyed and Legless" got to Number 6 in the winter of 1975.
You couldn't get much more Old Wave than the title and cover of the album on which "Wide Eyed" appears. The washed-out colour palette alone...
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"Legless" I get.... "wide eyed", though? It works in the song - but on reflection I'm not sure what he means... so drunk you've lost control of your vision as well as your limbs?
Did Andy F-L actually create an idiom here, by combining two existing idiomatic type words?
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Presumably it's the semi-inspiration for this made-for-TV film I never heard of before, and which seems to be trying to out-do the song for grimness.
Wide-Eyed and Legless (known in the US as The Wedding Gift) is a 1993 made-for-TV British drama film, directed by Richard Loncraine starring Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Sian Thomas and Thora Hird.
It is based on the 1989 book Diana's Story by the writer Deric Longden, who co-wrote the script with Jack Rosenthal.] The film tells the story of the final years of Deric's (played by Broadbent) marriage to his wife, Diana (Walters), who contracted a degenerative illness which left her unable to walk and in almost constant pain and which medical officials were unable to understand at the time, though now believed to be a form of chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis. As Diana's health deteriorated, she encourages him to spend time with another woman whom Longden has met (the partially-sighted and legally blind novelist Aileen Armitage (Thomas)), to help ease his pain over her eventual death.
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It's been borrowed at least a couple of times as the title for a book, including this one, where the "wide eyed" fits the idea perhaps of an innocent thrown into the decadence and madness of the rock biz:
Wide Eyed & Legless: The memoirs of a music biz journalist & pr
by Brian Anthony Harrigan
The story of a music journalist in the UK in the 1970s and early Eighties in which our hero is fished out of a freezing swimming pool by Ozzy Osbourne, is terrified by the older brother of the Kray Twins, inadvertently inspires a hit record for Lindisfarne, gets his best friend a smack in the mouth from Tony Iommi, helps launch a brand new music paper in ten days, co-writes the Encyclopedia Metallica, is horrified by Jimmy Saville, spends an afternoon in a pub with Genesis P. Orridge and an elephant's vagina, faints after meeting a Beach Boy, cruises the bomb-ravaged streets of Belfast with the Bay City Rollers and is at a complete loss as to what to do with Dee D. Jackson
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Looking for any info on the real-life inspiration for the Andy Fairweather-Low song, I came across a borrowing of the title by latterday singer-songwriter Laura Veirs
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In a mysteriously deleted post, a commenter notes what I had clean forgot: Talking Heads's "Cross Eyed and Painless" is clearly a nod to "Wide Eyed and Legless". So it must have got some radio play in the USA....
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A detailed interview with Andy Fairweather-Low, going from his pop star days in Amen Corner through the solo career and onto his long latterday career as a journeyman playing with figures like Eric Clapton and Roger Waters. Presumably his amiability and reliability have put him good stead...
Proficiency of the musicians - and the prowess / power of the singing - suggests an Old Wave into New Wave makeover.
And indeed...
Before Angletrax, the singer Wendy Herman was in Sadista Sisters, an all-female confrontational cabaret troupe who made a fairly feeble record in 1976 for Transatlantic Records
Their Brechtian agit-prop approach went over well in Germany and Holland though
In the UK probably big among a certain Time Out reading contingent
Although Sounds put them on the cover
Then the Sadistas dropped the soft rock stylings for something a little more arty and angular for one last single
Somewhere between Peter Gabriel and Pink Industry
Probably they heard a Judy Nylon record and thought 'oops better change it up sharpish'
‘This company aimed to explode myths about the female psyche and challenged the notion that women are there to serve as ciphers for male protagonists in theatre. This music/theatre company – eclectic, savage, funny, tender and populist exploited everything from performance art to punk – and carried on in many incarnations for 14 years. It was a marriage of many styles’ - from http://sadistasisters.blogspot.com/
Jude Alderson on Sadista Sisters first show at the Hard Rock Cafe, via Unfinished Histories, a website documenting alternative theatre in the UK
"The thing at the Hard Rock wasn’t a show, the thing at the Hard Rock was a sort of event… it was a happening. The first show was…the opening, the set was a pair of female legs and a heart shape, in the centre, which I don’t need to tell you what that was, with a cellophane covering, and Teresa and I in pink cat suits with these amazing masks that were across here [indicates across face], that were like with cheeks and dummies on them and we had pink swimming hats on. So we looked like babies or foetuses or whatever, and we tore our way out of this heart, and then we sang this song ‘Baby Doll’, so we turned immediately into…desirable… nubile, Barbie doll baby women."
