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
Where punk has glam running through it like jam in a Swiss Roll - anti-fashion is only glamour turned inside out - New Wave seems to me the actual anti-glam backlash - the reign of the ordinary bloke and blokette. A parade of only-a-mother-could-love faces (sometimes only-a-mother-could-bear voices too) in clothes that often seem to mock the idea of style or elegance, whether scruffy or showbiz-parodic. Facially, instead of alien beauty, it's the genre of geeks and speccy gits. Kooks and inadequates. Spudboys. People who ought to have never had the remotest chance of being in pop music, actually finally got their chance to be in pop music.
Lyrically likewise, there's a relentless emphasis on the mundane and the quotidian... Routine, office work, commuting, suburbia. The Members's "Sound of the Suburbs" and "Solitary Confinement", Jona Lewie the unsmooth operator hiding in the kitchen at parties, The Chords singing about English commuter belt drones who swallow their dreams like their beer.... Madness with their "Grey Day"s and "Cardiac Arrest"'s happening to briefcase-wielding commuters on the double-decker bus. Emotionally, the registers are bathos and pathos (Madness again - "Embarrassment"; the sheer genius of a song about the awkwardness of a teenager going to the chemists to buy his first packet of rubber johnies("House of Fun"))
And all of that is what's good about New Wave. The bubble of fantasy punctured. The plodders and the mis-shapes get their moment. No more heroics. Anti-stars.
Here's a song from a bunch of Noo Wavers (whose record covers I must have flicked past a hundred times) that's actually about stardom and being a no-mates loser.
Fabulous Poodles turn out to sound less pathetic than I'd always imagined from the name and the look - vocally a little bit Wreckless Eric, which I like... violin that's a tad Doctors of Madness.. , tiny bit of talk box which makes me think of "S-S-Single Bed" by Fox - but still falls some way short of making me want to investigate further
I mean look at these album covers
Here's a late-glam era group with a song about in-the-mirror play-acting wannabe-stars, supposedly inspired by Bolan, a friend of Steve H's
Although I say "late glam", Cockney Rebel look even more gorm-free in that get-up than Fabulous Poodles
Here in this American Bandstand clip, the Fabpoos are done up in ironic "entertainers, we" outfits.
"We're all losers on the dating game" says the singer.
I suppose that look is coming out of Deaf School maybe (a group on the edge of late glam / New Wave) (shades too of Sailor or Kursaal Flyers)
In this FabPoo clip singer's got a sparkly jacket - to be taken as a kind of anti-theatrical joke, I think, indicating the mutual discomfort between band and audience about the very idea of performance. "It's showtime!"
A character briefly hot in the British music papers - somewhere between Rick James and rap.
What was funny was that the left-minded writers just assumed there was something socialistic about Prince Charles and his big song "Cash (Money)". Or at least that it was some kind of anti-Reaganism commentary.
But in fact, as he happily explained, to said writers's evident befuddlement, it was simply the case that he really liked money and could do with some more of it!
Around that time there had been "The Message" and songs like "Money's Too Tight To Mention" by the Valentine Brothers (as later covered by Simply Red)
Prince Charles was a bit mono-thematic
Looking at these videos, I'm struck by how camp the clothing is - the leather, the studs, the exposed flesh.
(It's also quite Rob Halford in Judas Priest)
Musically, Prince Charles had a gimmick - an electronic wind instrument called the Lyricon
At some point Prince Charles grasped that the real lasting money in the business was not very like to come through his attempts to make it as frontman and leader of an expensive-to-maintain band, but by solo-careering it as in-demand recording engineer, which is what he did.
Not the origin of the vocal style but of me identifying it as such
Well not quite - in this June 27 1987 Singles column, in which "White Rabbit" turned up unexpectedly as a reissued single, Lord alone knows why (some kind of movie tie-in?) I don't use the term "that voice". But I do hurl out the metaphor of the stridently searing female voice as a lance or javelin for the very first time. (But not the last time, no indeed).
And there is the first inkling of a lineage, with the reference to the Ice Queen Siouxsie and the marrow-curdling intensity of Kristin Hersh
The Singles column had a whole thematic to do with "Ice", part of a running thing to with anti-humanism, inclement and inhospitable environments, "let us be angels or monsters, not paltry and lowly beings of the flesh".
I picked up the theme in an end-of-year overview minipiece on the voix mystere, sketching out the start of a canon
Recently I have been collecting "prissy locutions" - itself a rather fussy way of describing writing or speech that is excessively fastidious and finely phrased.
(Yes I am aware there might be an element of the kettle calling the pot black here)
As I labor through the second volume of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy - far less pleasing than the first - the one thing that consistently keeps me entertained is Merv's arcane word choices: anile, fuscous, cruddled, spilths, marcid, phasma, volitant and volitation, gracile.
That, and his precision phrasing.
For instance, Peake is such a stickler for proper grammar that when a group of characters leave a room, he refers to their ‘exeunt” rather than "exit".
Another prissy locution I came across recently was on some vintage UK television show (can't remember if it was a drama or a doc). A posh, well-spoken character referred to “trades unions” rather than "trade unions". Uttered with a flourish of fastidiousness that drew attention to the fact that he was pointedly saying it the correct way - an audibly dainty emphasis on the "s" on "trades", as opposed to the colloquial rendering.
I get the thinking behind "trades unions" - if it's unions plural, then necessarily that's got to be many different trades. Still, something in me remains unconvinced.
Presumably, with this thinking, you would have to refer to "trades unions leaders" rather than "trade union leaders"? The former is a bit of a tongue-twisty mouthful - all those esses. It might be correct but it sounds wrong. And as we know from the history of language, the vernacular pronunciation will ultimately triumph.
"Trades unions" is similar to a PL I have heard a bunch of times from British news presenters - "drugs dealers" instead of "drug dealer". And sometimes “drugs dealer” singular.
Again there is a certain logic there - any given dealer is likely dealing more than just the one drug (and dealers as a plurality almost certainly refers to dealing in many different drugs).
Still, it feels grating and pedantic. The conventional rendering is pleasanter on the ear.
I posted about this film Charlie Bubbles (1967) once before in a Hardly Baked series called "Odd Little Films" which only got to one post before sputtering out. The idea was that it was to be a celebration of the sort of movies that - while they may be minor or even not very good - linger in your memory. It might even be for just one or two scenes. They stay with you longer and more plangently than the sort of films that are well-made, obviously excellent, have a message or a point, etc etc. .
In this long-ago post, I lamented not being able to find online a particular clip from it that I had never forgotten and whose "naturalism" seemed very striking.
Albert Finney directed the film as well as playing the titular character: a Northern working-class best-selling novelist (probably modelled on Keith Waterhouse or Alan Sillitoe, someone like that). In the scene in question. Bubbles is gone back to his hometown (Manchester clearly, although I don't think it's ever said) to visit his young son and his ex-wife (played by Billie Whitelaw - wonderfully cross, tenderness glinting out through the sternness despite herself). He's left them comfortably off, so they live out in the countryside now - she's into keeping chickens and free range, organic stuff, making jams etc. She keeps a good table and, noticing that Bubbles is looking a bit sallow and under the weather, fixes up some hearty grub in the farmhouse kitchen. Finney munches away at this big bacon sandwich and there is a protracted stretch of chewing that goes on for about two whole minutes. Although his mouth is full he keeps taking big bites out of the sarny - it's a thick home-baked bread and he's masticating away, hamster-cheeked. The shot even follows through to him cleaning out his molars with his tongue for those clingy bits of granary crust and bacon rind.
Well, after that big build-up, now you can see this scene! At 1.04.17
From Angry Young Man to... Hungry Middle Aged Man
Another good scene - which immediately follows the Protracted Chew - is when Bubbles takes his little boy to Old Trafford to watch a football match. Being a celebrity bestselling novelist, a hometown lad made very good indeed, he's given the red carpet treatment - he and his son, decked out in football fan regalia, are ushered to a director's box, with bird's eye view. But it's remote and insulated from the crowd fervour of the stands, which is where the boy would much rather be. It's a poignant little scene.
I really like the whole film - the delicate balance maintained between quirky and gloomy. The atmosphere is soaked in the ennui of the novelist, who's got everything he ever wanted (money, acclaim, fame, a swanky ultra-modern pad in London) but lost what he had. There's an of-its-time blend of realism and surrealism to Charlie Bubbles that sits it competitively alongside Blow-Up (also about an archetypally Sixties figure of working class success - in this case, the Bailey-style star photographer - for whom the striving and the spoils alike become meaningless).
certainly it seems like it could easily be some kind of foundational visual text for your Oneohtrixes
(via Simon Price, who had some completely other comments on Fbook to do with the voice and the song thematics, relating to a kind of all-grown-up-now syndrome that befell Sixties and early '70s rock veterans, itself overlapping with the phenomenon of Divorce Rock)
